If you're building something really portable, you still need autoconf. Anything that has to run on a BSD or a Mac needs these tools. The article comes across

If you're building something really portable, you still need autoconf. Anything that has to run on a BSD or a Mac needs these tools. The article comes across as a bit of "blame the tools" where the tools aren't really at fault, it's the culture which has failed here. We seem to have never graduated from "wow it actually works" levels of Linux appreciation that isn't that different from the 1990s. Those distributions that most of us rely on (whether directly or indirectly) - Debian, RHEL - need to up their game somehow on vetting the packages they accept. We also need to stop just downloading .deb packages from the internet and installing them and preferring distros that look at security as a serious business including the packaging. Blaming autoconf is just silly. Sure it can be annoying, is mired in the past and perhaps seen as an anachronism now. But it's not to blame for supply chain attacks any more than a C compiler can be blamed for supply chain attacks.