CMake is painful to use for so many common things I find it hard to believe it's achieved the popularity it has. For instance, given the focus on out-of-source builds, the -H and -B options remain undocumented for vague reasons. The community has also sworn off clean builds for some reason. The most baffling part is how anemic the command line interface is compared to the scripting language. For a tool targeting the command line aware C/C++ communities, it's far too common to rewrite build scripts with awk/sed/perl because the command line doesn't have the options you need.

I think Bazel is a really cool option. It really does deliver on the 'fast, correct' promise strongly.

That said, it certainly isn't perfect. Windows support is something that could use some improvements. I've contributed a bit on that front, but since I don't actually use Windows myself it's mostly for the sake of making Bazel usable for more people so I can feel less bad adopting it in FOSS projects. There's a lot of small bits I just don't have time to try and help with right now.

(The usual disclaimer: I work at Google but not on Bazel. At least not during work hours :) )

Yeah, make can be useful tool but it solves different set of problems than Autotools or CMake. Definitely not a fan of either of them but currently CMake seems to be the least bad choice for cross-platform development. Like the C++ language itself ;-)