I could envisage cmake evolving towards meson by cleaning up it's complete weird syntax, but it suffers a little bit from something like Conway's Law: it's as convoluted as C++ because it deals with C++, and Hyrum's Law: again, because of C++, it has weird edge cases that people already depend on so it has to be backwards compatible for a long time.

I guess I'm saying cmake is the "build" system you'd expect for C++.

> After that the meson design clicked and boy howdy the amount of mental energy I put into my build systems has gone down comfortably close to zero. I adore meson.

I'm only a week or so into it, and it's been ridiculously easy to get along with so far.