For us(https://buildroot.org/) cross compiling with meson tends to be significantly more reliable than autotools already as it tends to be much better at separating host/target artifact builds within a project and setting up the toolchain correctly, autotools tends to need lots of package specific hacks in my experience.

We have a fairly customized integration(https://github.com/buildroot/buildroot/blob/master/package/p...) which we've iterated on for a while that works quite well these days. The cross compilation support with upstream meson has improved a lot over the years and while it's quite mature now IMO it still takes a bit of env setup to work correctly(but once it works it tends to not break much).