I think Bazel is actually a good build system, but the issue is that they lack good educational resources. Then others adopt it at smaller companies without a team to manage Bazel and without investing time to onboard others into understanding how it works.

There are some new talks coming out external from the Bazel maintainers which do a better job of this, but you still have to hunt for them.

This is made worse because each of the rules packages, which are super useful, have their own idiosyncrasies which only make sense with a solid foundation in what problems Bazel solves, how it works and how to write/read rules.

My other wishlist for Bazel was an easier time setting up a hermetic sandbox without having caveats. This is improving, so I am optimistic on this front.

For context, I am not a Google (or ex-Google) engineer and I’ve had to work with a ton of different build systems on different levels of the stack.