One needs to duplicate Google's build infrastructure, which is quite a pain versus other open source projects that rely on more mainstream tooling.

Which would be fine if they provided some straight forward way to replicate that (like a container). It really seems like open source doesn't have that high of a standing at Google (anymore?). I guess limiting hardware manufacturers use of open source, not spending time making sure other people can build open source code, is what gives you the promotion these days

It's probably gotten better lately. A few years ago it took me several days to get it built.

So it is not only me.

On my case I ended up giving up and went back to Qt.

I also found this to be true when I tried to use Skia.