Often the way they attepmt to manage 100 people is to split the monolith into a distributed monolith. Now you have all the same problems plus some new ones, but hey, we're "managing" the human problem.
And considering they somehow muddle along, with one person sometimes breaking everything for the other 99, and all the other problems, I think they could very well muddle along with a monolith. With 100 or however many programmers.
Yes, the distributed system with well thought out splits into services would be an improvement. But it's clearly not a necessity. So it remains that some places at least, use it out of some other reason - fad, cargo culting, whatever.
Architecture should be solving the human or other problems, definitely. But how often it does... I guess each with their own experience.
And considering they somehow muddle along, with one person sometimes breaking everything for the other 99, and all the other problems, I think they could very well muddle along with a monolith. With 100 or however many programmers.
Yes, the distributed system with well thought out splits into services would be an improvement. But it's clearly not a necessity. So it remains that some places at least, use it out of some other reason - fad, cargo culting, whatever.
Architecture should be solving the human or other problems, definitely. But how often it does... I guess each with their own experience.