Yeah. You hit the nail on the head. Lacking a standard package manager, no module system, need for incremental compilation, and semantically significant preprocessor symbols (among other things) make C and C++ require a lot of power tools for building at all correctly.

Even relatively cleaner languages like Java need fairly involved declarative config files like pom.xml.

> ...only the package maintainer needs to worry about these scripts...

Package maintenance is only one part of the puzzle. There are still analysis, code transformation, documentation generation, and other kinds of automation.

There's also packaging for different ecosystems. Each package manager, Conan, monorepo systems, and each company specific system out there (maybe the most common concern).

A language like python already has standard languages and formats to both keep the number of integration points small and to keep the remaining ones supported.

In other words, I expect project.json to mention Doxygen and clang-tidy and DPKG at some point. Otherwise there will need to be pretty flexible ways to expose bake-deduced data to those tools.