CMake does do a bit of automagic resolution of certain resources. It's a common tie-in with many ports/pkg systems, so in 3 ways CMake makes building official packages on OS project build servers much easier.
I also limit myself to only using CMake 3.3, which is the last version made for IRIX. Unless you're using a pretty extensive build system, building for IRIX is non-trivial. CMake makes it trivial by automagically bringing in all the various library and include locations.
