While Cmake has a large share of idiosyncrasies, a build system is much more graph oriented and must therefor at some point have a way to declare such dependencies, often using a DSL, for concurrency and incrementals to be reliable. Lets not forget IDEs that need to understand the project structure as well.

Workflows on the other hand are more conditional and imperative, mapping better to normal programming languages, with the exceptions of transient error handling, long timers and distributing workload. Here, writing a custom DSL would be a much bigger mismatch.

Best for build configuration would be a hybrid, where the declaration of dependencies is done with normal programming language, which at the end calls a build(dep_tree)-function where all the magic happens. With the risk of developers abusing this setup-step and run half the build in their own reinvented imperative flow here instead... trust me, I've seen this happen even in makefiles that run shell commands outside of targets. This is what Scons tries to be, it seems however not to be very popular compared to cmake.