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Google also has projects like this: https://github.com/google/breakpad
It supports 5 platforms, but uses 4 completely different build systems, including 2 custom ones (3 if you count depot_tools). There is very little overlap between the platform versions, meaning it's effectively 5 different projects smashed together into a single folder, and pretty much no way to use them in a cross platform project without some serious work. There isn't even a basic abstraction over the similar callback APIs between the platforms, although that's not a huge deal because the effort to write a basic abstraction layer is nothing compared to the effort of getting to a point where you can actually use it in a cross-platform project.
It's also funny that one of the build systems is GYP, which is basically a reinvention of CMake, except it's only used for the Windows build even though it can generate projects for the other platforms. Also, the VS project generator for GYP has been broken for a while (simple typo, trying to import OrderedDict from the wrong module. There's a PR to fix it, hasn't been merged for some reason), so it doesn't even work. Beyond that, it's also broken because GYP forces treating all warnings as errors, with a whitelist of warnings, yet the latest version (since yesterday at least) fails to build (tested on VS2019) because there's a warning that isn't in the whitelist.
You could try to fork it and fix these issues, but depot_tools doesn't provide a way to change the clone URL for repos, meaning you need to dig through the source code and wrap it in your own script that interacts with the internal APIs to do a simple clone (hint: fetch.py has a 'run' method that you can call with a custom constructed 'spec' object, which is a dictionary where you can inject your own url; just look at the hard-coded spec object for breakpad as a starting point). If you don't use depot_tools, then you need to manually clone all of the dependencies in the project since they're not even set up as git submodules.
There's also no versioning scheme whatsoever. Depot_tools seems to automatically checkout the latest version of everything (including itself).
I spent the past week wrestling with this monstrosity. Ended up successfully writing a Conan package for it that builds for Windows and Linux (there's one on Conan center, but it only supports Linux). I have 3 more platforms to go, but I think it'll be a better idea to just scrap everything and refactor into something more reasonable using CMake.
Instead of Breakpad, they also have a newer one called Crashpad, which is meant to improve reliability on Mac OS. Unfortunately, it depends on Chromium, so it won't work for my purposes.
...so all I'm saying is, maybe don't use Google as a role model for your project infrastructure.
/end rant
Lets look at a concrete example and then maybe we can discuss alternatives.
In this particular case, I would respond with the following:
1. I don't see why this is a problem. Have an "open PRs" link in the onboarding handbook that gives you a view of pull requests from all repos in the organization. GitHub automatically shows you notifications from all repos.
- Have a (Grafana) dashboard where you can see the latest / newest stuff. Use standard GH tools you use for OSS, such as follows etc to keep up.
2. Don't prematurely split into multiple libraries. "No monorepo" doesn't mean not having poly-package repos. It means thinking what the sensible API boundary is - treating your projects as you would treat library development. In this case a separate repo with lib3, lib2 and lib1 sounds like a good way to go - at most one repo per orthogonal internal framework (e.g. core-react-components).
3. Help other teams upgrade. If you are responsible for repo A, once you publish a new version and tag it with semver appropriately, use the dashboard to look at your dependants and work with them (or rather, for them) to upgrade. Think of your dependants as internal customers, and make sure you add enough value for them to justify the upgrade effort.
4. There are other alternatives to `npm link` e.g. see `yalc` https://github.com/wclr/yalc
Did you miss the "every time" qualifier? Everyone will have some core libraries, but most work will be very limited in scope. Outside of large companies you can see this effect in nixpkgs for example. See how few entries have a rebuild count larger than 10 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed