[nocombination]

I recommend taking a look at Autotools—if anything for historical context. It quickly becomes apparent that many features in CMake (and likely meson—no experience there myself)—are derived from some functionality in Autotools. It also helps one appreciate the package maintainers role in the software development lifecycle, as many of the GNU coding standards have influenced software packaging/distribution—be it RPM, Deb, Pacman, etc.

While there is certainly value in using CMake (as so many projects have chosen it as their build system)—it also becomes a sort of cautionary tale whence projects try to reinvent the wheel to fix some deficiency, only to build a complex system with it's own set of deficiencies. Obviously, part of this is due to the fact that commercial entities (cough Microsoft) deviated from any sort of standards-based approach to building software.

But for every build-configuration system, Autotools seems to be the only one which dictates that a developer machine merely have POSIX tools installed. Nowadays, that's all the big players, considering that MSYS2 on Windows is better than ever. And it supports many languages to boot: C/C++, Objective C/C++, Go, Fortran, Erlang.