I think the opposite - the descriptive language of bazel (buck, pants, build.gn and others too) is the key feature. I haven't seen anything that comes so close to defining in very precise, and clean manner your exact dependencies across multiple build platforms.
It is a foreign lang for folks used to MSBuild, .vcxproj/.sln, etc. - like the debug/release, or CRT options are not right away visible (just saw a commit 15-20 hrs ago in bazel to support dynamic CRT linking), but I'm sure this is coming.
My experience has been anything but positive in those systems. I spent ~3 hours trying to get build.gn to work for a "non-googler" config to build Chromium, gave up on it. Ditto Buck, hit some random dependency issue and would fail to run.
Honestly CMake gets a lot of hell but it's the only one I've seen work wide-scale. Short of a greenfield implementation (like say Rust's package manager) I don't think you'll do much better in C++.
It is a foreign lang for folks used to MSBuild, .vcxproj/.sln, etc. - like the debug/release, or CRT options are not right away visible (just saw a commit 15-20 hrs ago in bazel to support dynamic CRT linking), but I'm sure this is coming.