Am I thinking of it wrong, and using it as a "layer" above CMake to do the heavy dependency lifting is an intended part of Meson? Cmake has _huge_ support and mindshare in terms of third party packages and dependencies, even if it is somewhat difficult to learn "good" methods of writing CMakeLists.
I feel like spending the effort to learn a complete new build configuration metalanguage - and having to rewrite dependency discovery/builds, would be better spent on something like Bazel and it's mass-distributed compile capabilities, rather than something that looks just like cmake but with a new and unique language that to general approximation nobody else uses.
This is admittedly a rather uncharitable and possibly unfair way of looking at it - and I don't begrudge anyone trying to find a way of writing builds that fits better with them. Perhaps It's just a personal bias and I'm just getting to the age where learning a tool thoroughly and writing stuff that other people have a higher chance of experience in becomes more important than chasing... whatever it is that people value in this. (Or perhaps I have been too burnt by insanely complex badly implemented fragile SCons systems and not enough bad CMake systems).