Colin, we do not disable it in cmake. If libaio-dev (with headers and libraries) is on the box it will be used, if it is not on the box it won't.
If build runs with -DBUILD_CONFIG=mysql_release (which is used on Unixes for official release builds) missing libaio is normally not allowed, unless -DIGNORE_AIO_CHECK=1 is also given. Additionally, -DBUILD_CONFIG=mysql_release prefers to link with static libaio, to minimize runtime dependencies of the server.
This is a bit complicated logic (I'd rather made libaio-devel hard build dependency), but some people asked for graceful handling of missing libaio and other people were unhappy with libaio as additional runtime dependency, so it works this way now.
What is done on buildbot, I do not have a clear idea of. I do not exclude any possibility that -DIGNORE_AIO_CHECK was used temporarily because not every buildbot host had libaio-devel installed..
We don't have access to RedHat iso files at the moment. Rasmus is looking into it.