Kind of yes, but as someone who started studying CMake only recently, I'm terrified of the fact that it's a metalanguage (CMakeLists) above another metalanguage

Kind of yes, but as someone who started studying CMake only recently, I'm terrified of the fact that it's a metalanguage (CMakeLists) above another metalanguage (Makefile) on top of another metalanguage (command line) to compile projects in different language (C++). The amount of things CMake does under the hood is insane to me. And if you don't have a clue, at least in general, how it does its thing, you're walking thin ice...