The reason most of these things aren't replaced is sheer inertia. You're asserting they got this position due to merit. I assure you, spend any appreciable amou

The reason most of these things aren't replaced is sheer inertia. You're asserting they got this position due to merit. I assure you, spend any appreciable amount of time working with Autotools, or any of the "traditional" Unix build systems, and you'll find their success in large open source projects is only due to 1. Actually being better than the hodgepodge of shell/sed/awk/perl/etc scripts that people used before Autotools came around 2. The massive amount of work done by people to fix all of the corner cases where Autotools didn't work I think you're maybe looking at them with rose colored glasses. When you've spent hours trying to track down obscure, undocumented `./configure` options, dealing with vague linker and compile issues, implicit, circular or broken dependencies, buggy and arcane configuration scripts... I can go on and on and on about the problems of building open source software. Building things from source is a yak shaving exercise -- always chasing your tail. It's great when you're using a configuration that has been tested and mostly fixed up, but step outside of those parameters and it can be hell. It's not that newer build systems don't have their own issues, they just try to address the historical problems that people have experienced from using things like Autotools for decades. You can scoff all you want, but no sane individual is going to use Autotools as their modern build system. They're going to use something like CMake, or Bazel, or their language's build system.