I completely agree. I have worked at a company that had exactly this trajectory. It's also not just the number of employees, but also the age of the code and the number of micro-pivots that nobody bothered actually refactoring through the code. Specifically the company went:

- All senior developers who had a strong sense of the actual product and what they're trying to do -> no pull requests, everybody happy - An awkward middle area where eventually they had tripled in size and code quality was haemorrhaging customers and paralyzing attempts to release -> "what do we change?", nobody happy - Another doubling in size, giant organizational change -> PRs are mandatory, people aren't happy but any attempts to reduce PR burden has almost a straight line to bugs in production