I'm not sure what kind of C/C++ projects you install, but most of them are still ./configure && make && make install.
Cmake can be worse, Meson versionitis can be annoying. It is also annoying to install Meson and Python in stage 1 in Linuxfromscratch now. Yuck!
The languages aren't fundamentally insecure, there are tons of reliable projects out there.