> I have been working with Bazel in my personal monorepo (~6 months now), and the fact that Justine, someone I believe knows Bazel/Blaze well, uses GNU Make, makes me re-think my decision: perhaps I should re-consider it. I have quite a few issues with Bazel, which require significant engineering hours to overcome, whereas I could just use gnu make and solve it quickly.

It simply represents different tradeoffs of convenience vs. correctness. With Bazel, you get correctness but you pay a complexity price.