This certainly seems less awful than the typical C building process.

What I've been doing to manage dependencies in a way that doesn't depress me much has been Nix flakes, which allows me a pretty straightforward `nix build` with the correct dependencies built in.

I'm just a bit curious though; a lot of C libraries are system-wide, and usually require the system package manager (e.g. libsdl2-dev) does this have an elegant way to handle those?

Yes, many libraries are system wide that is true. This is something I had on the list of features to add. System dependencies. Thank you for the feedback!