To synthesis my comment down (because it's easier once I've written it once, poorly):
The complexity you see in Bazel/Buck/Pants build files may seem like a result of their decision to use a programming language. That's a red herring. That complexity is fundamental to the problems people need to solve to build software. If you remove the ability to solve it in your build system the complexity will move to other systems.
Wrappers, CI, whatever. The complexity is just the problem space rather than a result of bad tooling.
To synthesis my comment down (because it's easier once I've written it once, poorly):
The complexity you see in Bazel/Buck/Pants build files may seem like a result of their decision to use a programming language. That's a red herring. That complexity is fundamental to the problems people need to solve to build software. If you remove the ability to solve it in your build system the complexity will move to other systems.
Wrappers, CI, whatever. The complexity is just the problem space rather than a result of bad tooling.