All fair points actually, a lot of babel rules were originally implemented internally in the starlark interpreter itself (written in java). I think nowadays a lot of the language support is implemented in skylark, and "toolchains" are first class concepts.
I definitely had entire days occupied by bazel when I used it, but when I figured something out, it generally "just worked" for the rest of the team.
Yeah, I think my experience might have been different if I had access to someone who was familiar with Bazel or Blaze or perhaps even if I were trying to build Java instead of Python. Hopefully things are better now and next time I take a stab at it I’ll have more success.
I definitely had entire days occupied by bazel when I used it, but when I figured something out, it generally "just worked" for the rest of the team.