My experience is that CMake is fine (even great) for small to medium sized projects. Including dependencies, automating tests, even packaging is all handled with not too much fuss.
If you think your project will have more than half a dozen developers then you should probably start thinking about something like Bazel. But both have their idiosyncrasies and Bazel for a small project is overkill.
If you think your project will have more than half a dozen developers then you should probably start thinking about something like Bazel. But both have their idiosyncrasies and Bazel for a small project is overkill.