If you don't need to rebuild anything, bazel can fetch only the final artifact (not the intermediates) from the remote cache.

Also, if you have persistent CI workers with a persistent bazel instance, you save on some network roundtrips, but that's obviously harder to set up and make bulletproof.

Typically you need the intermediates to compute if you need the next one , so you cannot skip to final until you have the intermediaries.

The final asset/artifact is rarely small either. even best optimized artifacts can be few hundred MB docker image or more commonly multiple image layers running GBs in size .

each step is a network pull then recompute cache if stale and keep going till end .

Bazel can even skip the final artefact!