I made myself learn modern cmake after using archaic cmake and programming hundreds of lines of cmake functions. Aren't the variable scope semantics kind of fun in an admittedly sadomasochistic way? I'm not particularly competent and I had no problem grossing myself out. I programmed things in cmake that made my ancient advanced perl look like go. However it does all work and your own invented cmake build system is certainly not the most gruesome out there, and there is a lot out there.

Then I tried meson for my own projects, after deciding that cmake was just too ugly and aesthetics matter, to me. For about 3 months I fought the carefully thought out constraints but still liked it. After that the meson design clicked and boy howdy the amount of mental energy I put into my build systems has gone down comfortably close to zero. I adore meson.

Ah I should mention that five years ago or more even I bumped into rough patches in meson but I can say zero in the last few years. Bugs get fixed.

I don't think it implausible though that cmake seems to be getting better for the projects I dive deep into, in an almost meson way. Maybe the days of a project ~/cmake directory containing tens of files and 1000s of lines of bespoke cmake code are dwindling.

Now that I've drunk the meson koolaid, especially about the syntax not being a full programming language, something natively supporting lua, like xmake seems to, makes me wary.