Staying in the cooking pot of ever larger proprietary and exotic hacks is how organizations grind to a halt.
Your assertion really depends on your definition of "widely supported". Jumping from fad to fad, however, is only effective as a way to waste time.
>Staying in the cooking pot of ever larger proprietary and exotic hacks is how organizations grind to a halt.
Using established build systems for C++, whether autotools or even plain makefiles, ensures that the project doesn't suffer from bit rot and developers can focus om developing code instead of wasting their time trying out every flavor of the month. And do note that the main reason C++ hasn't adopted any official build system is that each and every flavour of the month ends up being very horrible and very hard to maintain.
Yes, including CMake. If a build system is known for telling essentially all users that they are doing it wrong, that means the build system is the problem.
In all seriousness, I think this is the only way. Yeah you may have forever to deal with it cross patching but let's face it, for big lumbering code bases, perfect backwards compatibility in the source tree is usually the smallest of issues, and the benefit of using standard tools far outweighs the cost of occasionally reinterpreting back-patches (if they are even possible.)