What we need is CMakeCMake. A special CMake for building CMake rules with its own special meta-language.

There is a cmake linter. I use it for some of the projects I inherited which still use cmake.

But cmake is a joke really. Overly simplistic, but for anything close to a real project compared to autotools, autotools is much much better. With autotools you get tons of constantly improving standard probes and fixes. Cmake is only for really trivially small projects.

I just added cross-compilation support for my aarch64 phones. It was doable with cmake, but it's a huge mess. With autotools it would have needed no changes at all. For cmake I need seperate CmakeCFG files. Not even talking about adding GPU support. Or valgrind. Or proper testing.