I think it's mostly a cultural thing? I see most Chinese devs prefer xmake, probably out of solidarity because its devs are also Chinese.

As for me, I also don't see the appeal in xmake. CMake, coupled with ninja, just works and for many popular libraries there's a great chance that you can add them to your project simply by doing a find_package because of how popular CMake is. The build systems landscape in C++ is already messy enough and I don't see how introducing yet another CMake-like would improve things. What we need is more .cmake files for popular libraries.