It's probably still the case a little; I've seen 21st century projects shipping a dozen or so of makefiles because in Unix/Linux land there's so many little var

It's probably still the case a little; I've seen 21st century projects shipping a dozen or so of makefiles because in Unix/Linux land there's so many little variations, like BSD vs Linux. I seems to me that Autotools is like Systemd : a relief for those who do that kind of task every day, and a bloated mess for others when you have to hack/fix it.