I lived the pain of hunting for binary downloads that match my exact Visual Studio version. Even if you were lucky enough to not need to compile from source, you'd still need to manually configure each library and include path for both debug and release mode separately. And, when you later move the project onto a new computer or share it with a friend, you're likely to discover that hidden somewhere in that mess is a path that's no longer valid.
By comparison, adding a library on Linux is usually trivial. Call 'apt install foo', call 'FindFoo' in your CMakeLists.txt, and use the variables FindFoo provides. Done.
The Visual Studio debugger, Intellisense and plugin integration are great, but project configuration is atrocious and nobody should be emulating Microsoft's approach on that.
> Text files aren't "stone age"
The issue is whether your build system provides you with an UI that enables you to be productive (e.g. Visual Studio), or if it forces you to manually edit some configuration files using some arbitrary syntax that doesn't seem to display any sort of internal logic (e.g. CMake). In this respect, being forced to deal with text files is stone age, just like debugging a C++ program with stock GDB.
In the end, it's a matter of preference. Do you want an IDE so that you can focus on programming, or do you want to set up and maintain a string of loosely coupled tools that, when the stars align, do what you want to.. kind of.