[megous]

ninja specifically handles includes automatically.

Anyway, not having any other automagical behavior and hidden rules and the fact that it can do incremental and correct job re-runs even when the rules change is exactly why I like to use ninja.

Here's one such use case, maybe not the cleanest:

https://megous.com/git/p-boot/tree/configure.php

I especially love it in projects involving many different compilers/architectures/sdks at once (like when doing low level embedded programming), where things like meson or autotools or arcane Makefile hacks become harder to stomach.

[Too]

Thats quite a stretch of what handles means. While it supports integrating such use cases but you still have to do the gcc -M dance with https://ninja-build.org/manual.html#ref_headers.

As opposed to say cmake, bazel or other higher level abstractions where you just ask it to take all c-files in this directory and solve the rest.

[megous]

Take meson. It's at the same level of cmake, but what handles the C include dependencies for it is ninja. cmake also has ninja backend. Not sure how it works exactly, because I don't use cmake, but I assume it will be ninja handling include deps too in that case.

Yes, ninja basically handles it for you, compared to what you have to go through when using Makefiles, to have autogenerated dependencies.