Comment by searealist

Have you ever seen how Starlark is used in the real world? The rulesets for Bazel and Buck could be described as "scripting". It quite literally automates actions.

Take a look here: https://github.com/facebook/buck2-prelude

Also, you are confusing how bazel uses starlark with starlark itself. It's trivial to expose an open or read_file function.