well said @the.wrong.tim 

i agree with most of what you said as well @Francis, i personally would like all manual gates to go (at least for our test/stg environments)

i think i'm pretty qualified to say this, having recently changed the aws_networking ( did you know i destroyed and remade all the igw routes in every bedrock env? ), the otel collector,
in my view we share very little in terms of actual utilities and modules, both between environments and components, just compare one of the original aws bedrock envs (prod/dmc) with the more recent ones i've been putting together to standardise the GSF (prod/endeavour).
pretty much none of our environments are the same, stuff is missing, named differently, whatever.
sometimes this is good because it means the blast radius of a change is small, if you change the otel_collector maybe only 2 envs are actually using it that you have to check on.
in practice even when you think you're changing a shared module, you're not actually, the pipeline is just running a bunch of independent tf. 

i think this is just `the way it is` with terraform, it's generally easier to copypasta something and change a few variables than it is to make a configurable reusable module that works for different use cases.
this can be fine, it means everything is super loosely coupled, but the tradeoff is that everything has to be managed independently. there's a proliferation of data blocks grabbing stuff by ID or name wherever is convenient

> contributor of the code has to either fix the breakages or liaise with consumers of the code to fix breakages

i think this fact combined with the very loose coupling terraform encourages has two chilling effects 

- writing and maintaining any kind of shared util or module in the monorepo is super unpleasant because you can break everybody's stuff without knowing how
- refactoring anything is also a nightmare
	- changed the name of something by adding a resource prefix? some ancient environment's data block now can't find its resource and it's **your** problem to fix it

this has basically led to a lack of sharing between components, standardisation, quality of life improvements... kinda antithetical to the whole idea of the monorepo (different discussion maybe, i digress...)

but in GSF we have shared modules that rigidly standardise every deployment so they get all the latest features and monitoring
it's just that we don't necessarily want to get those updates forcibly deployed the second they are released