Well, as with C, the ecosystem around it is mostly just misunderstood. Autotools isn't all that hard once you actually know what you are doing. While having a build and configuration system that has the learning curve of a hockey stick isn't the nicest thing, spending some time to know to to use it gets you a lot of knowledge and access that is hard to come by otherwise.
I have spent about three weeks going deep in the autotools rabbit hole (mostly converting FOSS projects that used other build systems and then ran into trouble) but coming out the other side I can say it's not as bad as it looks, and compared to other systems it could be much, much worse.
As was posted earlier, calling C a "portable assembly language" seems right, and having a portable system to go with it to build and have common functionality isn't all that strange when you think about it that way.
While other systems might be easier for a lot of cases, not much out there can get you where the classic stack of C + Autotools + (g)make + glibc/musl gets you. As with everything, it's a tradeoff between quality, cost (As in time/knowledge) and options.
I have spent about three weeks going deep in the autotools rabbit hole (mostly converting FOSS projects that used other build systems and then ran into trouble) but coming out the other side I can say it's not as bad as it looks, and compared to other systems it could be much, much worse.
As was posted earlier, calling C a "portable assembly language" seems right, and having a portable system to go with it to build and have common functionality isn't all that strange when you think about it that way.
While other systems might be easier for a lot of cases, not much out there can get you where the classic stack of C + Autotools + (g)make + glibc/musl gets you. As with everything, it's a tradeoff between quality, cost (As in time/knowledge) and options.