It's a completely valid and useful idiom. Whatever build system you use, it's trivial to add these kind of libraries to the project. The fact that one has to l

It's a completely valid and useful idiom. Whatever build system you use, it's trivial to add these kind of libraries to the project. The fact that one has to learn complex build tools (and often multiple ones), is the sad thing here. Luckily there are also unity builds, which are extremely handy in many contexts, because they are so fast and easy to use between different platforms without having to deal with annoying external tools.