[jeeeb]

From your description it sounds like you might be going off the beaten track and hitting problems.

When I was doing C++ on Windows getting a dev environment setup just meant installing Visual Studio with an appropriate Windows SDK version (or the Windows SDK + build tools for a build system).

You can have multiple VS versions installed side-by-side. To get a terminal with environment variables set correctly you just need to use the shortcuts from your VS installation.

For third party dependencies we checked the headers and (pre-built) binaries into the repository. I don’t remember ever having more than a dozen or so in total. It was usually things like boost and zlib.

Having done that you can just point CMake directly at the packages rather than worrying about FindPackage.

Working in tools like Python and Node, personally I often miss the simplicity and stability of this approach.