there's a wonderful blog post about this that I wish I could find and can't. I feel like it was a github gist.

The gist of it is something like:

- Bazel community hits a problem with something like how npm behaves around paths

- Bazel's solution is to create a patching system around paths to resolve them

- rinse and repeat for every piece of tooling us "normies" are using

The end result is that instead of Bazel's efforts showing up in the base tooling, they build up a bunch of their own tooling and patches, and the underlying tools don't get really much if any benefit. Moving to Bazel still is a PITA, and there's a lack of improving onramps

In an alternate universe when people in Bazel land hit issues they would show up with patches and recommendations _to the underlying tools_ to get things merged in so that the workflows can be better supported across the board.

I don't think anyone working on Bazel is against upstreaming, but I think they discount the value of it because, hey, _they_ can get patches and hacks working for their flow