Every single time I need to do something a tiny bit custom in meson I end up in a rabbit hole of frustration, many tickets opened by other developers which a similar issue/request and many years pass with the situation unchanged...

The latest:
1. be able to specify a subdirectory for an output file https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/2320
2. be able to use exe-wrapper during build https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/11029 (it is only supported for tests)

so I need to hack my way around the build system yet again 😭