1. The single version dependencies are asinine. We are migrating to a monorepo at work, and someone bumped the version of an open source JS package that introduced a regression. The next deploy took our service down. Monorepos mean loss of isolation of dependencies between services, which is absolutely necessary for the stability of mission-critical business services.
2. It encourages poor API contracts because it lets anyone import any code in any service arbitrarily. Shared functionality should be exposed as a standalone library with a clear, well-defined interface boundary. There are entire packaging ecosystems like npmjs and pypi for exactly this purpose.
3. It encourages a ton of code churn with very low signal. I see at least one PR every week to code owned by my team that changes some trivial configuration, library call, or build directive, simply because some shared config or code changed in another part of the repo and now the entire repo needs to be migrated in lockstep for things to compile.
I've read this paper, as well as watched the talk on this topic, and am absolutely stunned that these problems are not magnified by 100x at Google scale. Perhaps it's simply organizational inertia that prevents them from trying a more reasonable solution.
For instance in multi-repo environments I've often seen this pattern: own some code, bump an internal dependency to a new version, see it break, ask the person maintaining it what's us, realize this case wasn't taken into account, few back and forth before finding an agreement.
On the other hand in mono-repo environments, it's usually more difficult to introduce a wide changes as you face all consequences immediately, but difficulty is mainly a technical/engineering difficulty rather than a social one, and the outcome is better than the series of compromises made left and right after a big multi-repo change.
Why is effort a requirement?
Why should being an artist be a viable job?
Would you be against technology that makes medical doctors obsolete?
On jobs: craftsmanship is slightly different than art: industries are built with people who can craft, there is today an artistic part in it but it's not the essence of the job: the ads industry can work with lower quality ads provided they can spam 10x. There is however an overlap between art/craftmanship: a lot of people working in these industries can today be in a balance where they live with a salary and dedicate time to explore their mediums. We know what will happen when the craftmanship part is replaced by AI, being an artist will require to have the balance in the first place.
It feels like a regression: it leads to a reduction of ideas/explorations, a saturation of the affected mediums, a loss of intent. Eager to see what new things come out of it though.