> As described above, at scale, a developer will not be able to easily edit or search the entirety of the codebase on their local machine. Thus, the idea that one can clone all of the code and simply do a grep/replace is not trivial in practice.
Yeah this is a pretty widespread and fundamental misunderstanding that leads to a lot of bad policy decisions.
If 'grepping code' is your first resort then you're hitting things with a hammer. I'm writing code that a machine is supposed to understand. If the machine can't understand how the bits interact then I have much bigger problems than where my code is stored. Probably we're dealing with a lot of toxic machismo bullshit that is hurting our ability to deliver.
If you want discipline, if you want cooperation, hell if you just want to be able to hire a bunch of new people when you land a big customer, you need some form of support for static analysis and the code navigation that it enables. Stop the propeller heads from using magic and runtime inference to wire up the parts of the system, or find a new gig. Even languages where static typing isn't a thing have documentation frameworks where you can provide hints that your IDE can understand (ex: jsdoc for Javascript).
For a large team, working without any kind of static analysis is a recipe for a rigid oligarchy. Only people who have memorized the system can reason about it. Everybody else who tries to make ambitious changes ends up breaking something. See what happens when you trust new people with new ideas? New is bad. Be safe with us.
And even if by some miracle you do make the change without blowing stuff up, you're still in the doghouse, because we have memorized the old way and you are disrupting things!
Some crazy ideas work well. Some reasonable ideas fail horribly. To grow, people need the space to tinker and an opaque codebase ruins those opportunities. Transparency is also helpful when debugging a production issue, because people can work in parallel to the people most likely to solve the problem (even the person who is usually right is way off base occasionally). I should be able to learn and possibly contribute without jamming up the rest of the team by asking inane questions.
You need pretty good but entirely achievable tooling and architecture to get that, but man when you do it's like getting over a cold and remembering what breathing feels like.