If you use Bazelisk (https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazelisk), you'll automatically get the matching Bazel version for TensorFlow in the future (and all other projects that have adopted the .bazelversion file).
Awesome. Bazelisk provides exactly the sort of compatibility I was hoping to see.
Though, manually specifying a maximum Bazel version doesn't seem like it should be necessary. The authors of Bazel know what features they have changed since the version specified as the minimum, and Bazel itself knows what features the BUILD file uses. That information together could be used to calculate the maximum version.
This is fixed now: https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/commit/991aec351b57...
If you use Bazelisk (https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazelisk), you'll automatically get the matching Bazel version for TensorFlow in the future (and all other projects that have adopted the .bazelversion file).