> I tried to like cmake for twenty years.

This statement alone automatically eliminates any credibility from what you said. CMake was revolutionized with CMake 3.0, which was released in 2014. Since then CMake became a radically different build system, and got so many things right it became the de facto standard.

Also, CMake is a build system generator. It's just a high level specification that generates build systems that you pick, like make, ninja, even visual studio and Xcode.