[ploxiln]

I consider myself rather adept with Makefiles for Gnu make, and I also find autoconf scary (I'll be checking out the "autotools mythbuster" linked above though).

I'd guess that autotools and cmake have a lot of complexity to do C/C++/libs related stuff that is inapplicable to html/js projects, and I'd suggest almost any of the others: waf, scons, plain make ...

ninja, as you've probably heard, is designed to be the backend to some other frontend which generates all the explicit dependencies and commands. That could be cmake, it could be a custom script of yours. Then ninja identifies changed files and runs an "incremental" build as fast (parallel and minimal) as possible.

Just btw, I wrote a from-first-principles sort of tutorial on Gnu make: http://www.ploxiln.net/make.html