The problem is that interviewers have a strong tendency to judge candidates based on whether they come across as self-confident, even when instructed not to. It's possible to get people to not do this, but it requires fairly rigorous training. tptacek wrote about this a decade ago: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/
I'd argue the "presentation and Q&A" format addresses that directly. The candidate gets to pick exactly what the interview is going to be about, at least at the beginning, so they have full control over first impressions. No gotchas at all. Who wouldn't pick something they're confident about?
If someone thinks Cmake is super cool and knows all sorts of great use cases for it, then they should present that. They should also be prepared to answer open-ended follow-up questions like "broadly speaking, how could a project transition from something like Automake to Cmake?" or "what are some footguns in Cmake and how can we avoid them?"
