Well my issue is that I have used CMake quite a lot, with generators, in non-trivial projects (both open source and proprietary), and I have always been fine with autotools, cmake and meson.
I don't try to have cmake do too much, e.g. I don't run the generation (or python scripts or custom functions) from cmake, because it quickly becomes a mess and running the steps manually / in a script is usually easy.
I haven't seen a project yet where the cmake config is not a mess (because let's be honest, most CMakeLists out there are pretty bad) and where this is clearly a limitation of cmake (and not of meson).
Happy to get an actual open source example where that's clearly the case, though.
I don't try to have cmake do too much, e.g. I don't run the generation (or python scripts or custom functions) from cmake, because it quickly becomes a mess and running the steps manually / in a script is usually easy.
I haven't seen a project yet where the cmake config is not a mess (because let's be honest, most CMakeLists out there are pretty bad) and where this is clearly a limitation of cmake (and not of meson).
Happy to get an actual open source example where that's clearly the case, though.