The systems that I use it for all have Python installed by default, so really it's just: 'pip install meson', which takes all of a few seconds to run.
The binary it produces is still dependency free.
The binary it produces is still dependency free.
Distributing binaries outside of package managers is a) a rarity in the Linux world, and b) not in keeping with the open source philosophy. Requiring end users to have python so they can compile a c/c++ application will never make sense for a large portion of the user base build systems target.
And like I said, many Linux systems (and almost any used as a developers machine) will have Python installed by default.
And the simplicity of meson's build files far outweighs any issues installing it.
But the project now depends on Python, pip and Meson.
I mean it's not like Python is a rarity on Linux systems, or a difficult thing to install (assuming it wasn't installed by default)