This was my fist experience with blaze too. First it was, wtf is this shit, and theze blaze-bin/etc folders. Then after I left Google I realized how much I miss it. No Make is not a replacement, or ninja.
Why?
The world has been running on make for decades, and it runs just fine. Meanwhile, does Bazel support basic stuff like shared libs or vended libs that are not deployed system-wide? Last time I checked, it didn't.
Can you actually provide a working example?