FWIW, I had the vague idea that it’s an IDE’s job to manage the project’s build system. I think we’d need dune files to be simple enough to be manageable by a program (IDE) while remaining editable manually. The IDE could bail if it encounters unknown directives or if certain assumptions on the project structure are violated.
It would be nice to just click to add a component, choose its type (public library, private library, collection of executables, etc.), specify dependencies and give it a name. I don’t have much experience using such IDE features let alone designing them but it seems like they would or should exist elsewhere.