At the moment, NDEBUG is set irrespective of the build type used. This will mess with user's expectations that debug builds will have assertions enabled.
It would be best if this situation was avoided altogether but it would already be a big improvement if the ASSERTIONS option was defaulted based on CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE. This would still cause issues in case the build type is changed at a later point but at least on first configuration, it would do the expected thing…