> your runfiles tree
I don't remember using runfiles much outside of tests in Bazel, even at Google. My guess would be that runfiles are packaged up into via MPM [1], which in open source world I would guess a container image is the closest equivalent? Then you get hermetic runtime environment, especially because k8s/containers seems to be the default deployment platform these days. I think the bazel OCI rules [2] should package runfiles too (I haven't checked)
[1]: https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa14/conference-program/...