Autotools treats Makefiles like they are object code. We should promote Makefiles to being source code in a project and learn how to write them. The need for autotools died long, long ago when there were so many different platforms people were trying to support.
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.
