I think the problem is that there is no good cross-platform build tool and as a project grows it almost always depends on some other runtime/language.

I don't want to manage Cargo.toml or requirements.txt or pyproject.toml or package.json or whatever. It's all the same stuff - just a dag of dependencies, each has it's own type and output and build pipeline and defaults and env vars etc.

Bazem, from what I've heard, is the best. Maybe that is the reason for the lack of adoption - it's very good but not good enough?

PS. I never used Bazel