Yes. Recursing your Makefiles produces poor results. You know who hasn't read the Make manual and makes recursive Makefiles? The cmake devs.

If you truly need a lot of complexity, you can end up with unreadable Makefiles, as you say. Most projects don't need a lot of build logic, though. I have lots of projects using mrbuild, and their builds are clear and easily maintainable. If you truly need a lot more, then Make might not be the best choice. And you can do much better than cmake