[viega]

Yes, 100%. And since CPP doesn't actually understand C, it's not too hard to do some lightweight preprocessing that requires some real additional parsing.

But while CPP is pretty finicky and not very modern, getting such things working seamlessly with C build systems can be vastly worse (though better than the days where the GNU tools were ubiquitous).

I tend to find meson easy to use compared to all the others, and do this kind of thing, but it's still difficult and brittle.