> It's been 9 years since Modern CMake came out, and I'd estimate adoption at 50-50.

> The current CMake language is fine. Nothing amazing, but good enough.

I'd argue these two statements are in conflict.

I came to c/c++ after several other languages and ecosystems -- the c++ dependency/build ecosystem is by far the worst.

CMake does work. It's underlying capabilities are great, even. But "modern cmake" is sort of a joke syntactically. Generator expressions are indecipherable. Semicolon delimited arrays, no distinguishing between input/output variables... I personally would love for a different DSL frontend to CMake.

> I don't want to disparage the team's work--CMake is awesome software--but the way they see it is very different from the way typical developers see it.

I have to agree with this. The underlying core of cmake is actually pretty awesome. Modern cmake is an improvement in capability. The team deserves credit for that.