With the full caveat the CMake has to solve a design space that has a lot of legacy it still just makes a lot of unintuitive choices. I have to go look up the command line for generating vs building every single time I use it, and I've been using it for many years at this point.

Rust benefits a bunch from second mover advantage here but cargo is just soooo good in comparison. Sane defaults, descriptive commands and stuff like cross compilation that can be hell-on-earth with CMake/etc I find actually easier in cargo + cc crate + build.rs for small/medium libraries.