[OnlyOneCannolo]

I agree with your opinion of CMake.

Most of my career has been in non-mainstream software development. There's always a ton of rare, unique, or broken stuff that I have no control over. In many situations, adding an extra layer via a generator (such as CMake) adds more work than convenience.

I've also found CMake's documentation to be useless most of the time.

By the time I track down and fix all the issues, I might as well have just written a Makefile (or whatever obscure, ancient build tool they use).