I've been a C dev for a long time but this bullshit still makes me want to repeatedly stab myself in the eye with random sharp objects. For most projects you get away with just running autoconf, sometimes you need autoreconf, then there is libtoolize, random arguments you might need to pass, aclocal which was said to go away soon since two decades or so. I've looked at the Wikipedia page so many times trying to finally grasp this but simply running all the related commands with random arguments until it works is much easier.

Cmake is referred to as bloated and admittedly its DSL is awkward and annoying but just using it when you want to compile something is straight forward.