As a Googler I am very satisfied with Blaze (the internal version of Bazel) at work. But I just don't want to manage such a complex beast for my own personal projects. Besides the large amount of dependencies to install for a build tool, it demands me to manually rewrite the build script for almost all third party libraries. At Google someone has most likely done that for me, but outside it, I have to do it myself.
This is the catch with Bazel. All of its integration with npm, pypi, crates.io, etc are hacks that essentially vendor the source of your dependencies and attempt to generate BUILD files for those deps with some heuristics. For a lot of packages the heuristics work, but not all. Ultimately bazel needs you to vendor and hand-maintain BUILD files to get a seamless experience.
