I guess it comes down to organisational style. Using merge requests requires some benevolent dictator (poor sod?) to perform the merges. For us, if your commit is approved in Gerrit, it's your task to merge it. If some other commit was merged in between, you have to rebase, possibly solving merge conflicts. So guess that with a monolithic repo, that wouldn't scale, but it could be made to scale by appointing someone to perform the merge requests. I'm not sure I would like to be that person...