I hear what you're saying here, but I like to delay going in the second direction as long as feasibly possible.

In theory, the idea that "people can specialise where appropriate without having to understand the whole thing" sounds good. In reality, so many, many, many bugs and piles of technical debt pile up from developers with a worms eye view who don't understand how the whole system works. Eventually you have to make this compromise, but resist it as much as you reasonably can, and always strive to grow developers so they know as much of the system as they possibly can.