I'm not familiar with it, can you elaborate why it's controversial?
Bazel is the externalized version of Google's internal build system. I think it has likely been overused by the overzealous in situations where its complexity is unwarranted and so a lot of people dislike it.
However it is absolutely fantastic at what it's intended for, providing a single build system across a large multilingual codebase, and building/running quickly, with extras for running tests, etc.
It also, AFAIR, gives you full reproducibility which is nice.