[lewisl9029]

I think many of the ideas/techniques behind Bazel are excellent: hermiticity, distributed caching, dependency analysis, massively parallel execution, etc. There are so many things every other build system out there can learn and apply from Bazel that could make them 10x more effective.

But IMHO Bazel's fundamental flaw is that it tries to be a one size fits all solution that's supposed to work for all languages and ecosystems. That pretty much guarantees that it will have more need for boilerplate/configuration, be less performant, have more bugs, and at the end of the day just offer a worse user experience than a build system that applies all of Bazel's underlying ideas/techniques while being designed solely for a single language/ecosystem and more deeply integrated into it.

I think the eventual best case scenario for Bazel is a jack of all trades, master of none, but in its current state, for most of the languages/ecosystems it claims to support, it would be way too generous to even call it a jack of the trade in terms of overall UX.