I'm reminded of an oldie-but-goodie paper on Bazaar-style development efforts vs. hierarchically organized humans writing code that might interest folks hitting this page[0].
tl;dr: Bazaar efforts tend to develop loosely coupled or decoupled architectures, and hierarchical organizations tend to produce architectures with centralized API backends or messaging structures - neither architecture is "better" in an absolute sense, but each is "better aligned" in a Conway's Law sense with the human structures involved. Big sweeping generalizations, obviously, and the project you're working on is obviously the exception, but it can be a fun read if you're into large scale software development efforts.
tl;dr: Bazaar efforts tend to develop loosely coupled or decoupled architectures, and hierarchical organizations tend to produce architectures with centralized API backends or messaging structures - neither architecture is "better" in an absolute sense, but each is "better aligned" in a Conway's Law sense with the human structures involved. Big sweeping generalizations, obviously, and the project you're working on is obviously the exception, but it can be a fun read if you're into large scale software development efforts.
[0]https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/08-039_1861e507-...