We can test and change them independently, some features just require changing just one repo but most features affect multiple repos. But yes, essentially, it's a ball of mud in our case anyway because the separation between the two most important microservices is unclear (cannot be explained simply, there is no clear logic/responsibility separation besides the fact that one is an older codebase and the other is newer).

I've worked on a lot of projects in my career and this one has one of the most complex/chaotic architectures I've seen yet. Surprisingly, it recovers from service downtimes and reboots pretty well. The main issues are maintainability, deployment and configuration. It's often the case that local env does not match staging when building features.