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Honestly, I think it’s really important for people to have at least some grasp of the whole product structure even if they don’t directly work on it all the time.

If you focus only on your own thing it quickly leads to alienation from the rest of the team.

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Why is alienation a problem? As far as every part of the system is being worked upon by somebody who specializes in that part, the system should do well.

The problem is risk; if there is only one person that knows something about X, the project is at risk if that person goes away. If OTOH you have a team of full-stack developers with shared ownership and understanding of the codebase, that risk is mitigated. The challenge is that people (in my experience) generally WANT to specialize in one area of expertise, they want sole ownership of one part of the code.

A team can have redundancy without every developer having to know the full stack.

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