[dtolnay]

> the minute you want to do something that doesn't fit the mold, it makes things a lot harder

This is not my experience at all; it's been extremely helpful for doing things outside the mold:

In a work codebase that is millions of lines of first-party Rust code with thousands of third-party Rust dependencies from crates.io, we're building with Buck not Cargo because that is what the rest of the monorepo uses for C++ and other languages. It's fantastic for this that all the third-party projects describe their dependency graph in the same standard Cargo manifest format and follow a standard project layout, even though our builds do not use Cargo, because we can programmatically translate them to Buck targets.