Meson is quite nice if you want to build software exactly and exclusively how the Meson designers want to build software.

The world does not work like this though. CMake is weird but once you've learned some non-intuitive stuff, it works very well and there's a reason why pretty much everyone is using it.

Meson's approach to simplicity is if you need anything nontrivial, you simply add it to Meson itself. In CMake, you can script it in more cases.

Depends on what you need; you can easily call out to external Python scripts to solve many problems, which will work everywhere because Python is needed to run meson itself.

I initially tried to use Meson for a small emscripten project targeting WASM, but it seemed stuck on the idea that I was cross-compiling (technically true), and this seemed to make everything more complicated. With CMake I was able to hack together a working build configuration without too much trouble. I just had to tell it that I wanted to use emscripten as the compiler.