Comment by throwaway2037

Is your backend Java or C#? Your IDE description feels like Java w/ Eclipse or IntelliJ or C# w/ Visual Studio. I have similar experience to you. The "discoverability" of a large codebase is greatly increased by combining language with tooling. If you use Java with Maven-like dependency management (you can use Gradle these days if 'alergic' to Maven's pom.xml), the IDE will usually automatically download and "hook-up" source code. It is ridiculous how fast you can move between layers of (a) project code, (b) in-house libraries, (c) open source libraries, and (d) commercial closed-source libraries (decompile on the fly in 2021!). (I assume all the same can be done for C# w/ Visual Studio.)

To be fair, when I started my career, I worked on a massive C project that was pretty easy to navigate because it was a mono-repo with everything in one place. CTags could index 99% of what you needed, and the macros weren't out of control. (Part of the project was also C++, but written in the style of career C programmers who only wanted namespaces and trivial generics like vector and map! Again, very simple to navigate huge codebase.)

I'm still surprised in 2021 when someone asks me to move a Java class to a different package during a code review. My inner monologue says: "Really... do they still use a file browser? Just use the IDE to find it!"