Everything is monolithic by accident. Source code used to be able to be shared and compiled directly with little effort. Now we have created tools to create entire systems dedicated to running source code. We have literally codified a poorly designed, middle-manager riddled organization into our current systems.

> Source code used to be able to be shared and compiled directly with little effort.

At what point was your "little effort" claim true? Compiling random OSS projects has never been particularly easy. You've always needed to hunt down all the compile-time dependencies and get those compiled/installed.

There was a time when source code was shared in magazines and someone had to manually write the source by copying from the magazine.

The point is: systems that are used by smaller numbers of people can have some intrinsic benefits that you may not be aware of.