I don't have any specific example off the top unfortunately, and some of my confusion was likely because I was trying to pick it up along the road of Bazel matu

I don't have any specific example off the top unfortunately, and some of my confusion was likely because I was trying to pick it up along the road of Bazel maturity so things were changing. When I say BUILD vs WORKSPACE distinction, I actually mean it was tough as an outsider who hasn't used a blaze-like system (or Cmake for that matter) to understand what the guardrails in bazel were and how the WORKSPACE provides certain guarantees to the rest of the system. So, it is a conceptual thing that once I understood that role, things clicked.