You just made a much better argument for why to use Meson than the Meson guys themselves made. At the end of the day, I don't want to have to know any build sy

You just made a much better argument for why to use Meson than the Meson guys themselves made. At the end of the day, I don't want to have to know any build system let alone CMake. Period. Full stop. I want my build system to be declarative. That way, when it breaks, and it will break, I can fix the dumb thing. (Here's an example of the kind of breakage that CMake has: I can't compile with "zig cc" and friends, because there's a space in that compile command and CMake has baked-in parsing. Whoops. Yeah, CMake is slowly fixing that, but it's going to take forever to roll out a fix for something that shouldn't be in scope of the build system.) The fact that your project's build system needs complex features should be treated as a gigantic red klaxon to me, as a user, to stay far, far away from it. Needing to use complex features for build means that you need to reorganize your project and/or your "build system" needs to be broken apart into phases that are containing the complexity. I am picking on CMake here, but this is a failure of any build system that tries to do "too much". Cargo, from Rust, has similar problems.