[surrealize]

I worked at a company that was about 150 people when I joined. It's not primarily a software company but the early team had a bunch of ex-google folks, and they chose Bazel. I encountered it for the first time there. We did use React, yes.

I really liked the cross-language aspect of Bazel. Having one command that could compile everything and produce a deployable container in a highly reproducible way is great. It really cut down on "what's your compiler/tool version etc."-type back-and-forth during debugging with other engineers.

The bazel JS/TS rules were tough to work with when we first started using it for JS (2018 I think), especially since we were using create-react-app at the time, and that didn't mesh well with the way bazel wants to work. It's gotten a lot better though.

If I was making the choice from scratch in a new company/codebase, I think it'd really depend on the team. You kind of need broad-based buy-in to get the full benefits IMO.