The point is that the realities of not being able to deploy in lockstep erode away at a lot of the claimed benefits the monorepo gives you in being able to make a change everywhere at once.
If my code has to be backwards compatible to survive the deployment, then having the code in two different repos isn’t such a big deal, because it’ll all keep working while I update the consumer code.
The point is atomic code changes, not atomic deployments. If I want to rename some common library function, it's just a single search and replace operation in a monorepo. How do you do this with multiple repos?