This seems like a good thing if front-end fragmentation is not an issue, ie. if it's hosted on a server and kept in sync with the backend through deployment.

As a mobile app? Maybe not.

I'm honestly a bit puzzled which scenario the original article is envisioning when arguing this, because it mentions mobile, but then also argues for monorepos, which are kind of at odds with each other, unless you somehow force your mobile users to always be using the version that matches your back-end.

Oh, I see. Yeah, you'd definitely need to be very careful in this case.

To be fair though, this is a general problem when clients and servers might not agree on data formats. You can still safely do what the author is describing since type checking occurs at compile-time and not runtime.

You would, of course, need to be sure your app handles whatever the API/db returns at runtime though. But, again, this is a general problem.