Help wanted - Typescript MERN stack monorepo setup

[saini-g]

I am setting up a monorepo style project with workspaces, the project structure is as follows

my-monorepo
 ├── packages
 │    ├── backend
 │    │     ├── tsconfig.json
 │    │     └── package.json
 │    ├── ui-lib
 │    │     ├── tsconfig.json
 │    │     └── package.json
 │    ├── utils
 │    │     ├── tsconfig.json
 │    │     └── package.json
 │    └── web
 │          ├── tsconfig.json
 │          └── package.json
 ├── package.json
 ├── tsconfig.base.json
 └── yarn.lock

The backend and web are the main frontend and backend apps, utils is a dependency in both web and backend, and ui-lib is a dependency in the web app.
Currently I have used typescript package references to setup the cross dependencies by following the below steps

• Run yarn workspace @my-monorepo/backend add @my-monorepo/utils to add utils as a dependency in backend package.json

• Update the tsconfig of the utils workspace

  "compilerOptions": {
    "declaration": true,
    "declarationMap": true,
    "composite": true,
    "baseUrl": ".",
    "rootDir": "src",
    "outDir": "dist"
  }

• Update the tsconfig of backend workspace

  "compilerOptions": {
    "baseUrl": ".",
    "rootDir": "src",
    "outDir": "dist",
    "paths": {
      "@my-monorepo/utils": ["../utils/src"]
    }
  },
  "references": [{ "path": "../utils" }]

The build runs fine, and then I am also able to start the app, and it works as expected.

The only problem is when I remove the old builds and then try to run the backend development server using nodemon and ts-node, it fails to startup because it expects the build output of the utils workspace to be present.
Once I run the build command, everything goes back to normal and the development server also works fine.

Is this an expected behavior? I initially expected the development server to startup even if the build outputs of the cross referenced workspaces are not present, but now I'm confused since there are a lot of moving pieces - tsc, nodemon, ts-node, the node module resolution algorithm, and yarn pnp

What would be a recommended way of setting up such a monorepo?