> I prefer microservices/microrepos _conceptually_, but we had the same experience as your quoted text - making changes to four repos, and backporting those changes to the previous two release branches, means twelve separate PRs to make a change.

You only need to coordinate this sort of changes if you have absolutely no versioning strategy in place and accept breaking contracts for no reason at all.

If you have any form of versioning in place, you do not need to push multi-project commits. You update upstream packages and services, roll them out, and proceed to update the projects that consume them to gradually point them to the newly released versions.