A Monorepo Doesn't Fix a Structure Problem, It Relocates It
Date Published
Shared code duplicated across separate repos, version mismatches between a design system and the apps consuming it, the friction of coordinating a change that spans multiple codebases — a monorepo genuinely fixes these, because the shared code and its consumers now live, build, and version together.
What it doesn't fix on its own is unclear ownership or unclear boundaries between packages — those problems just move from 'which repo' to 'which folder,' and a monorepo with no enforced boundaries between packages can end up just as tangled as separate repos were, minus the version-mismatch symptom that made the tangle visible before.
The projects that get real value out of the move tend to pair it with actual tooling for the boundary enforcement and build caching a monorepo makes possible — without that, it's mostly just a different way of organizing the same underlying structure, good or bad.