As a relatively newcomer to bazel, I did find it arcane:
- I couldn't find an easy way to list targets
- in particular, a way to show me the path to the build artifacts (so that I could inspect it in my editor)
- I couldn't find a way to do build configurations (especially intersections of build configurations)
- it didn't seem great at handling non-file build steps (set up a cluster / server / whatever so I can run my tests)
- the documentation was slow to load and hard to find things in (you basically had to use search, instead of browsing a good table of contents)
As I said, though, I'm a newcomer; it's quite possible there are good ways to do those things, I just hadn't managed to find it in the documenting yet. That and the issues are by no means unique to bazel.
I also do like some aspects of it (like enforced out-of-tree builds), but that's off-topic ;)
Non-file steps: normally in bazel you would consider the server setup a part of the test. So `blaze build :my_test` creates an artifact, and blaze run or blaze test runs the artifact which does non-hermetic stuff like setting up a server.
