But you only have to do this if you don't want to run an actual GUI or ncurses UI which does this for you for some reason ? What would you suggest instead ?

Why do I need to run a gui or ncurses UI if I just want to do the equivalent of configure && make && make install?

The equivalent of this is

    cmake -S source_folder -B build_folder 
    cmake --build build_folder
    cmake --install build_folder

You don't need to run a GUI at all for this, I don't see how you could infer this from the previous messages

Something like 'cmake --list-options CMakeLists.txt' seems the most obvious.

I don't think it would be meaningfully different from what you would get by doing

    less CMakeCache.txt

Listing the options cannot be done by just introspecting a CMakeLists: what would it show for:

    if(FOO)
      option(ENABLE_BAMBOOZLE_${FOO} "Enable Bamboozle - ${FOO}-specific version" OFF)
    else()
      option(ENABLE_BAMBOOZLE "Enable Bamboozle" ON)
    endif()

(and if your meta-build system does not allow to do that, I'm sorry but I'll have to build a meta-meta-build-system on top of it which implements it and no one will like it)