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In contrast the last really fast-moving place I worked at has 1-3 devs per project but they were entirely 100% in charge of technical design, building it, shipping it, and maintaining it. If we wanted to wait to ship, we waited. If we wanted to ship early, we did it. I'm in an org 3-4 times the total size now and we move at half the speed.

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That sounds great for moving fast, but not so great for sharing and keeping info about these projects. If/when someone quit, how would their projects get split up for other devs to maintain?

It definitely had its downsides especially for the 1-dev projects. In reality it wasn't that bad. Code reviews usually pointed out where documentation was needed or would be helpful, and everyone was just senior enough where you could give them a feature ticket on one of these small projects and reasonably expect they'd be able to just figure it out if they had to.

Outdated or missing critical documentation, or too junior (or too lazy) coworkers would definitely have made this approach fall apart and that's a big risk of it IMO.

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