>Anyone who’s tried to deploy their own complex Maven project knows that it’s a true nightmare.

Maven != Cargo

> C++, on the other hand, has a variety of choices for build systems.

None of which even remotely approach the ease of use and maintainability of the Cargo build system.

> once you need to build something that the default build system doesn’t support, you’re in big trouble.

Cargo can build arbitrary dependencies using the build.rs build mechanism.