I don't buy it. You don't have to own the _ENTIRE_ application to be a developer of one. I've seen many developers that were solely responsible for a specific feature and shipped what I'd consider poor quality.

Large software project, whether you're a developer of one or a team (and probably more commonly occurs in a team since it's large) will have warts. It's harder to manage complexity as the projects size increases since it accumulates and it accumulates fast.