and is pretty much unuseable in the traditional unix setting where you are supposed to vendor nothing and use all the libraries of the OS however broken they may be
Technically bazel can load any external files, but they must be tracked as workspace dependencies, which is more verbose:
E.g.
new_local_repository(
name = "system_libs",
# pkg-config --variable=libdir x11
path = "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu",
build_file_content = """