If I had a nickel for every time a developer said “it was just easier to rewrite...” I’d be a rich man. It always seems easier to start from a clean slate and do a rewrite than to try to understand someone else’s code, but in the end you just wind up with a different set of hacks and complexities.

I often find Make easier to debug than CMake because it’s more transparent about which commands are being used and there are fewer files to inspect in the process.