Actually, LaTeX has to recompile everything even after a tiny change (there are rare exceptions like TikZ, which can cache pictures, but even then it can put them into some file on its own AFAIR, so that I can still have one big file).
Now that I think about it, LaTeX is a very bad analogy anyway, since LaTeX documents usually have a very linear structure.
LaTeX is an obvious case: why pay to recompile the whole huge project, for each tiny change?