Completely agree that you can't compare Bazel and CMake directly, they are not on the same level. But for compiling C++ Bazel will have to compare itself to CMake, which is plain and simple the defacto standard.

All the complex things that Bazel brings into the game (distributed builds and caches primarily) simply don't have any value when the main task that you're trying to make faster is not done well.

I would much rather like to see more tooling that does these things but builds upon layers of battle-tested existing software.