With C++ you can choose to ditch the old garbage and use just the new comfy stuff in a greenfield project.

With CMake, the new stuff still sucks.

Doesn't Bazel / Buck do a better job? The only downside might be IDE integration outside of Google / Facebook but I think there's effective polyfills that generate compile_commands.json.

> nothing less sucky seems to do the job

For me, Nim and Nimble work pretty well.