Was your project built in multiple languages and tied together using Maven? Or was it just JDK languages/Java?

Tools like Bazel or Nix or are incredible for many reasons but they are, to a first approximation, very, very high-effort and complex tools that require care. It's like a racing car. You need an engineer on hand to keep the car running, and someone to drive it too. Maybe you're both of those people, but only a driver isn't enough.

They also suffer from another problem which is that most people don't care as much as you or I do. :) So to make it a slam dunk, you have to make a pretty clear case that it's not "just" 2x better, but actually 10x better. And it's actually even harder than that: it can't just be 10x better in practice, it has to appear 10x better at a glance. Like, at the window shopping phase, it needs to catch their eye. That's difficult to nail and basically impossible to do perfectly.

Personally? I'm all-in on "whole sale" build tools like this that hit many nails with one hammer. They solve a tremendous amount of issues. But they aren't always good and I can really see why they can fail to gain traction for many teams: they simply aren't necessary for them, even if they're really a lot better in many ways. I get it.

> Tools like Bazel or Nix or ...

I find it interesting that Bazel and Nix don't seem to complement each other as much as I'd think given that they're both 'high effort, high reward tools which deal with hermetic building'.

They certainly both suffer from issues related to upstream packages doing their own thing.

> They also suffer from another problem which is that most people don't care as much as you or I do. :) ...

I use Nix. I haven't use Bazel.

I think Nix is wonderful for enthusiasts. It takes some time to learn. However, Nix is excellent at dealing with packages. And developers often do things which involve packages. -- e.g. Nix is good for declaring a shell with programs that can be made available.