There is also a way to simultaneously reap the drawbacks of monorepos and multirepos: consolidate numerous small repos into somewhat big monorepos and then don't merge everything into one big repo.

This way, you'll have to deal with

* difficult tooling

* dependency hell between the mono repos (which are now way more tightly coupled due to the dependency graph between them being denser)

* long living branches causing way more collateral damage as described in the original article

* cross-repo changes have become even harder for all the reasons above

You get all the bad things and avoid those advantages! Welcome to my world :)