What is the "best" way to manage builds and dependencies in cpp projec

Question

What is the "best" way to manage builds and dependencies in cpp projects. Meson seems to be perfect for building, but I cant figure out a reliable way for dependencies ?? I guess subprojects might be by far the most reliable solution, but it would mean that the dependencies i want to use are already a meson project, which is often not the case. Is there a good dependency manager that I make use of for a toolchain that would work everywhere? conan seems to be able to work with meson, but I already had problems with broken dependencies in conan (sdl2-image for example)