The Zig is far more explicit about what it is doing with lots of very long dotted commands for specifiy version headers and such, so maybe not super fair unless you like magic.
Whats an example of magic in the meson.build that you don't understand? I think this is the first meson.build I've ever looked at and it seems very straightforward.
Didn't say I didn't understand it, I just said it was less explicit. Read through the Zig and it is super clear what every step is doing, and it sets things much more explicitly than the meson build