They also went the cmake route of not trying to be the build system, but the meta buildsystem which just writes out ninjafiles, or makefiles and lots of other obscure formats in case of cmake. This is probably also the reason why cmake 'won' so far.
I think they did it in order not to duplicate make's functionality. Make is useful for partial rebuilds (when you change a single file only it is recompiled). You either use make or have to implement this yourself.
They did it because they didn't want to duplicate Ninja's functionality. It does partial rebuilds, it's been heavily optimized for just doing that, and it's a Google-created project that they're already using for other non-Bazel projects.
I'm loving meson. I have around a hundred thousand lines of code building with it and it's the cleanest build system I've used yet. Much less obscure than make or cmake.
