Personally, most cases I have seen are caused by a systematic under-investment into developer toolings and infrastructure at the company. Management layers often don't understand the software development assembly lines are not composed of just workers(software engineers), but also tools and machines that enable faster workflows. This often results in some critical processes in the pipeline from code to prod to be maintained by 1 guy: monitoring, alerting, deployments, builds, git etc... and when that 1 guy left, the system failed and the company suffered.
I think successful Bazel adoption in an org is often a signal that the company has grown in size and values its developer's time and happiness. Failure to adopt often means a lack of investment in dev experience in general.