Bazel is definitely designed for a very different model than how most of the world works. (I.e., Google's internal model.)

This clearly shows in Bazel's Python support: its internal version (Blaze) gets used quite often with Python inside Google's monorepo, and it works very nicely in that role, but that's a very different way of using Python than approximately the entire rest of the world. It's still Python, to be clear, just everything else is pretty different. ;)

Still, Bazel's model is pretty great if you adjust your brain, tooling, and patterns to it. I accept that most people don't. And some of its preferred usage patterns are more trouble than they're worth in a typical small shop anyway, at least with the usual other tooling one has to integrate with.

Tradeoffs...