To be clear, I'm not defending autotools. But every C build system will have to deal with some mess. That may be having multiple configurations for multiple OS

To be clear, I'm not defending autotools. But every C build system will have to deal with some mess. That may be having multiple configurations for multiple OSes (with weird exceptions for weird OSes or WASM), snowflake libraries that just had to have their own pkg-config replacement, fiddling with flags for various flavors and versions of MSVC and non-MSVC compilers, rpaths, sovers, etc. To me it's inevitable that every project that starts with "just 5 lines of simple CMake/Makefile, look how simple it is!" will end up with the same mess everyone else ends up with.