It doesn't matter much when you build only once, but more people need to be aware of Ninja for builds. Both cmake and meson can target it, and it is much faster for incremental builds.
That being said: have used Ninja with Cmake. Damn fast.
Consider the Linux kernel as a contrast, which doesn't suffer from slow make because a lot of investment was made into a non-recursive make system.
The fact that makefile generators like CMake tend to generate recursive makefiles is a shame.