Also I have been looking to move away from Makefiles and bash scripts and Bazel does come up more often. What are your experiences working it and how does it compare to Blaze?
The good is that I find BUILD files easier to read/reason about than Makefiles and it also is multilingual.
The bad is external dependency is hard, especially if you want to take advantage of all of bazel's features like hermetic builds. Most larger C and C++ don't use bazel to build and don't have BUILD files, so you end up maintaining your own build system for that project OR use something like [this][1].
Plug: for those interested in codesearch within bazel repositories, my vscode plugin for bazel has a special feature for this: https://stackb.github.io/bazel-stack-vscode/searching