As much of a dog as cmake is, "just use make!" does not solve many of the problems that cmake makes a go at. It's like saying go write assembler instead of C because C has so many footguns.

GNU Make has a debugger. This alone makes it far superior to every other build tool I've ever seen. The cmake debugging experience is "run a google search, and try random stuff recommended by other people that also have no idea how the thing works". This shouldn't be acceptable.