From a user's (or at least, builder's) perspective, autotools have the nice property that they work pretty much everywhere without requiring any additional tool

From a user's (or at least, builder's) perspective, autotools have the nice property that they work pretty much everywhere without requiring any additional tools than some shell and some make while also understanding a ton of standard-ish (well, they are part of GNU standards anyway) configuration options in terms of where to build something, where it would install, where to copy the files, etc. I tend to build a lot of programs from source code and those that use autotools are always the most frictionless, especially since i like to put things in their own directories (so that i can easily remove them) instead of installing them globally. From a developer's perspective, i tried to use autotools at some point and i really wish there was a real replacement that provides all the features autotools have (including not requiring to have that replacement installed, like cmake, meson, etc do) while being a bit more user friendly.