I never had strong feelings between microservice architecture and monoliths. It was always monorepos that bothered me, and their tendency towards brittle, highly-coupled, incestuous code.

Is there a nice way of having a monolith that is not a monorepo, without being too cumbersome when developing?

Because they are not?

Sample size of 1, but the most popular article on my blog is about to practically build a modular monolith. It was inspired by a Google paper published 2 years ago: Towards Modern Development of Cloud Applications[0] which touched on the shift from microservices to monoliths that can be deployed modularly.

Very much worth the read as it is easy to skim.

[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3593856.3595909

Ok