There is some truth to this. Moving some things to data brings interesting properties but it's a two edged sword. Things are simpler to use when kept as code. Maybe code emitting structured data.

Looks like a nice resource for CMake. The documentation for it isn't always great especially for beginners, hopefully it should fill that gap.

Clearly I can understand the feeling. That's yet another attempt at a solution for this... it's young, will it get traction? Has the benefit of being kind of simple, too simplistic maybe?

Interesting tidbits I didn't know about. The little Python API provided to generate Ninja files could turn out interesting.