As far as bazel bugs, it's safe to say that if you stick to the ways that Google uses blaze, then you are unlikely to run into bugs. E.g. Google doesn't run blaze on windows or use system toolchains, so it makes some sense that those are where the issues are. Unfortunately, Google also uses their own rules, so the rule quality for open source rules varies somewhat since they haven't all been battle tested in the same way. blaze and the Google codebase have also co-evolved for like 15 years to work nicely together, whereas anything adopting bazel today might be an awkward 3rd wheel for a while.
Yeah, I've figured as much in hindsight. It'd have been nice if they were more forthcoming about this than leaving it as a surprise for everyone to figure out (including, now, for the parent to whom I replied).
Disclosure: Ex-Googler