[IshKebab]

Bazel is the only sensible alternative for C++. It's obviously way more work and not really worth it for really small projects, but it is at least well designed and it solves real problems through hermeticity.

But if you're not going to go to that effort I wouldn't really recommend anything other than CMake. There are alternatives that are a bit better (Meson) but then you give up on using the de facto build system (as much as there is one).

Also I've found that a lot of the "cleaner" C++ build systems are partly only cleaner because they ignore the full range of complexity that real world C++ builds have to content with. Rpaths, symbol visibility, etc.