I've worked on projects using autotools, and worked on projects using CMake. While CMake does add Windows support without having to use MSYS or similar, I've found the syntax and language semantics of CMake incredibly painful to work with.

CMake feels very "stringly typed", worse so than shell. For instance, the definition of if conditions: 'True if the constant is 1, ON, YES, TRUE, Y, or a non-zero number. False if the constant is 0, OFF, NO, FALSE, N, IGNORE, NOTFOUND, the empty string, or ends in the suffix -NOTFOUND. Named boolean constants are case-insensitive. If the argument is not one of these constants, it is treated as a variable.'

CMake has variables, and something vaguely like dictionaries, but the syntax again seems very string-like, with a SET() function and the <name> PROPERTY <name> syntax.

And on the flip side, CMake retains many of the quoting and argument splitting problems from shell scripting, without the well-established solutions for those.

In general, CMake seems like an exercise in minimal syntax: "can we build a language with no operators or symbols?". The result feels wrong in the same way COBOL does.

If you can treat CMake as a completely declarative language, it more or less works. However, the moment you have to actually use it as a programming language, it becomes painful.

I'd rather have shell scripts than CMake, and that says a lot.