I also have had bad experiences with scons and much prefer declarative build systems with options to escape to external executables when you really can't help i

I also have had bad experiences with scons and much prefer declarative build systems with options to escape to external executables when you really can't help it. Because the vast majority of the time, you can actually help it. Having friction to using bespoke compilation steps is a feature in my experience, it means that devs will use standard build elements whenever possible and if a problem occurs the "wildcard" external binaries can more easily be probed and reviewed.