Dude, IDK if you have used bazel OUTSIDE of Google, but I've used it both inside and outside of Google and I can tell with 99.999% confidence that the experiences are dramatically different.

Bazel != Blaze (internal version of Bazel).

1. Google has a well maintained monorepo. Most companies don't. That diminishes the meaning of a good build system in the very first place; even if Bazel is powerful, with separate repos it's power isn't the shiniest.

2. Google open sources a part of Blaze, which is the external Bazel, but not all to it. That's what Google does with basically everything it open-sources. The outcome then, is that the external tool require you to build a lot of other not open-sourced tools to replicate the excellence of the entire Google internal eco-system that makes the internal tool so amazing. Same goes with Bazel. It works amazingly internally because there are so many people supporting it, and so many other tools work nicely with it. But not all the features and tools are open-sourced together with Bazel, so the diff of experiences internally VS externally is significant.

TL, DR: if you're a small company without a good monorepo strategy and someone experienced on this, DON'T EXPECT BAZEL TO BE YOUR MAGIC CURE.

Disclaimer: my current company uses Bazel pre-1.0 and it's definitely dramatically worse than what I used internally at Google. I haven't tried 1.0 but I don't expect the ecosystem problem to be solved in 1.0 anyways. Also Bazel sort of sucks for python anyways. Really hoping someone can prove me wrong and say 1.0 is actually the lit shit.