This misses the forest for the trees IMO. You have to look at “what problem does CMake try and solve”, and the answer is basically “generating build files for toolchains across a varied set of operating systems and environments”.

Now do I think CMake is perfect? No, certainly not. But syntax is the least of the issues with it. And it’s an enormous improvement on autotools in allowing you to improve portability of your build to Windows for e.g. - and worth saying that this was true before VS added CMake support.