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Building large-scale C++ projects has become less of an issue because of CMake slowly becoming the default build tool.

An alternative opinion (that I happen to hold) is that the unbelievable pain and frustration of dealing with CMake has been at least one of the forces that have led to the Cambrian explosion of new programming languages and build systems in recent-ish years.

While CMake is pretty annoying the problem from my experience are people using it incorrectly and doing stupid stuff that you can't change if you're using the project as a library.

If every library would be properly "packaged" using CMake would be far less annoying or frustrating. Just recently we had the case where a 3rd party library author of a sizeable c++ library set -Werror in his library which wreaked havoc.

It's mainly CMake's opaque and magical way of working that frustrates me so.

I feel you've outlined yet another failure mode on top of the frustrating and undiscoverable magic incantations that seem to change with every undocumented revision.

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