You really prefer autotools or CMake to esbuild just because they are older and don't change as much? I will take esbuild over CMake every day of the week and twice on Sunday. C++ build tools are an abject disaster. (And CMake does change anyway)
Building JavaScript is just a fucking disaster. I’ve used a fair number of different bundling tools—Browserify, Webpack, Rollup, Esbuild, and Closure (the compiler). I’ve also used old-school concatenation… anything from <script> tags to something like “cat”. It’s just fucking awful. Stay on the straight, narrow path and you’ll survive. Deviate slightly and you’re doomed.
Making things worse, you might have two different environments you run your code in. Node.js and the browser. Surprisingly, the browser lurches ever fowards, and Node.js is the anchor keeping us in the past. Making things worse, you might try to use TypeScript. Making things worse, you might use JSX.
Nearly every JS project I work on needs a ton of babysitting w.r.t. the build system. At various places I’ve worked, there might be a team handling that for me, but if I’m working on a side project, it is very difficult to keep the complexity of the build system down to a reasonable level. Most guides on how to use frameworks will tell you to do something like “oh, just use create-react app” or similar, and you end up with a couple dozen new dependencies. Your build system will be a mix of templated code pasted in to your repo and third-party libraries. Integrating with anything else often requires various "adapter" dependencies, but it's a roll of the dice whether those libraries are built reasonably.
My basic desire is often a fairly simple list… I want front-end TypeScript code to be type-checked and bundled, I want a dev server that serves the bundle, I want to see build errors quickly and easily, I want to run tests without a browser environment. I know this is possible, but every time I’ve gotten it, it’s taken an unreasonable amount of effort.
The thing is, as the same somebody noted, that then it stays trained.
To quote from upthread, "the same insane for 30 years" is in and of itself a huge feature that makes up for quite a lot of insane.
And CMake still seems extremely C/C++ focused. I don't want a language-specific build tool anymore. Heck, I'm not even sure I necessarily need a build tool so much as a generic task runner with patterns and complex/dynamic dependencies.
Things are getting better. but js has definitely had more churn, and reinvented more wheels than anything else i know of.