Still trying to understand why ownership breaks under scale

One pattern I keep noticing is that ownership feels simple when systems are small.

A few people.
A few responsibilities.
A few moving parts.

Everyone generally knows who should handle what.

But as teams, systems, and priorities grow, ownership becomes harder to maintain.

Not because people stop caring.

But because complexity increases.

More alerts.
More requests.
More stakeholders.
More dependencies.
More competing priorities.

At that point, issues don't usually fall through because they weren't detected.

They fall through because ownership becomes less obvious.

Someone assumes someone else is handling it.

Responsibility becomes shared instead of explicit.

And follow-through becomes inconsistent.

The interesting thing is that most organizations already invest heavily in visibility.

Monitoring improves.
Reporting improves.
Detection improves.

But ownership often remains dependent on people manually coordinating around the information.

I'm still trying to understand whether this is:

• primarily a tooling problem
• primarily an organizational problem
• or simply an unavoidable consequence of scale

Curious how others here think about it.

What has been your experience as teams and systems grow?