I only wish Bazel had been written in a language that produced native binaries like C++ or Go instead of Java. It seems like a waste for me as a non-Java developer to install Java on my dev machine just for Bazel.
You don't need to install Java. It's bundled. In fact I'd recommend that you don't even install Bazel itself. Instead, install this: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazelisk. This will install either the latest Bazel for you automatically, or you can pin a version of Bazel you want in each repository, to limit and control build system churn.