That's often the case yes. In a monolith a developer disgruntled about the situation can clean up the mess in a weekend, test it and push it through. No chance of that happening in microservices - you'd run out of weekend just opening PRs in the dozens of repos and dealing with all the nitpicking and turf wars.

Exactly the problem yes. Once you have more services than developers, you are probably running into infrequent releases and orphaned projects.

So whenever an inevitable common utility improvement is made, the effort of pushing out 100 repo releases for services no one has touch since Jim left 3 years ago is terrifying.

When there is a breaking change is going to be made and you HAVE to do the 100 releases, it's terrifying. Everyone says it never happens, but work on a project/team for 5 years and it does eventually, even once is enough to swear me off this "architecture".