It's a general observation on over-engineering, "resume driven design", and proportionality being somewhat of a blind spot in software. But yeah, I'm not going to lie, my brain certainly patterned matched towards "this is going to be a Bazel guy isn't it?". So, Buck2 was close enough. Those are exactly the kind of multi-week pet projects I'm talking about that are too often introduced under vague and disproportional pretenses. Well, multi-month and dedicated specialists going forward are perhaps more accurate for those. But maybe that's the point.

But my argument has been that _Make_ is already too complex for the given task.

And talking about complex C and C++ (to be fair, the complex ones are almost always C++ ;) projects, I would not say that CMake (or Meson or ...) is less complex than Buck 2, it certainly has _way_ more magic than Buck 2. And getting Make & C++ & ccache(or whatever) & distcc (or whatever) to work _reliably_ isn't easy either ;)