Sure, visual studio builds have been, and still are up to a point a bit miserable experience. But not as miserable as trying to use gnu tools for building C++

Sure, visual studio builds have been, and still are up to a point a bit miserable experience. But not as miserable as trying to use gnu tools for building C++ on windows. I have over a decade of exprience in that and it's always equally painfull. There were good reasons to use GNU tools when MSVC did not have thorough enough support for C++11 and GCC did. Now MSVC is pretty good with the latest C++ standard. Besides, Windows now comes with a real posix virtualized environment - Windows subsystem for Linux - which works great - use that, not msys2 or cygwin if you must have a gnu build system on a windows...