When you need a configuration step, cmake will actually save you a lot of time, especially if you work cross platform or even cross compile. I love to hate cmake as much as the next guy, and it would be hard to design a worse scripting language, but I'll take it any time over autoconf. Some of the newer tools may well be more convenient - I tried Bazel, and it sure wasn't (for me).

If you're happy to bake one config in a makefile, then cmake will do very little for you.

For toy projects good old Make is fine...but at some point a project gets large enough that you need something more powerful. If you need something that can deal with multiple layers of nested sub-repositories, third-party and first-party dependencies, remote and local projects, multiple build configurations, dealing with non-code assets like documentation, etc, etc, etc - Make just isn't enough.

> most of the time CMAKE is just overkill and does not play well the compiler/binutils provided

You need to define a CMake toolchain[1] and pass it to CMake with --toolchain /path/to/file in the command-line, or in a preset file with the key `toolchainFile` in a CMake preset. I've compiled for QNX and ARM32 boards with CMake, no issues, but this needs to be done.

[1]: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/manual/cmake-toolchains....

For simple projects. Make is easier for simple things I will grant. However when your projects gets complex at all make becomes a real pain and cmake becomes much easier.

Cmake has a lot of warts, but they have also put a lot of effort into finding and fixing all those weird special cases. If your project uses CMake odds are high it will build anywhere.