Meson is strongly-typed; it goes beyond just having a notion of "paths" and tracks what kind of object paths point to, and what kind of resource strings name. This is invaluable, because it means you get feedback when you accidentally pass an object file instead of a library name or any number of other confusions.

Personally, this meant the error messages I got were helpful enough that my first meson-built project was working after a half-hour of deciding to port it over despite using several system libraries and doing compile-time code generation.

Meson's language is not Turing-complete, so it's easy to analyze for errors. Unlike CMake and autotools, Meson's language looks like a real (pythonish) programming language, and it isn't string-oriented; dances of escaping, substitution, and unescaping are uncommon.

Compared to autotools or hand-rolled Makefiles, CMake is a step in the right direction; meson is a leap.