The original reason for adding Meson was to support fwupd, a very important use case which AFAIK is only intended to work with internal programmers for in-system flashing in Linux.

Mission creep was not the intention, though Meson has evidently gained popularity for other use cases. Notably, according to a comment in CB:61198 Chromium now uses Meson for all builds too. ChromeOS and fwupd are probably the biggest users of flashrom when it comes to use of internal programmers. Also, as mentioned earlier in the thread there are many distributions using Meson for packaging.

It will be good to understand why they are going this route and if it's better for the project in the long run. Personally I am more familiar with Make, but even I can see that our Makefile is one that only a flashrom developer could love.