+1. I'd go as far to say that multi-repo probably needs as much, if not more effort to properly keep functioning, but all that effort is better "hidden" so people assume monorepos are more work.
With a monorepo, it's common to have a team focused on tooling and maintaining the monorepo. The structure of the codebase lends itself to that
With a multirepo codebase, it's usually up tu different teams to do the work associated with "multirepo issues"— orchestrate releases, handle dependencies, dev environment setup, etc. So all that effort just kinda gets "tucked away" as overhead that each team assumes, and isn't quite as visible
With a monorepo, it's common to have a team focused on tooling and maintaining the monorepo. The structure of the codebase lends itself to that
With a multirepo codebase, it's usually up tu different teams to do the work associated with "multirepo issues"— orchestrate releases, handle dependencies, dev environment setup, etc. So all that effort just kinda gets "tucked away" as overhead that each team assumes, and isn't quite as visible