"Won’t we lose platforms that aren’t Linux or BSD?" Well, as a mostly-mac user these days, a sane Makefile that I can understand and fix is much preferrable to some automake-generated monstrosity that does not work...
Which leads us to my next point: The article talks about autotools, but only seems to address autoconf. As long as projects used a hand-made Makefile.in, it was, in my experience, usually possible to skip running autoconf and edit the Makefile and config.h manually, if the autoconf script turned out to be completely inadequate. It was the introduction of automake that turned makefiles into an inscrutable mess, where everything happened through four levels of variable expansion.
Which leads us to my next point: The article talks about autotools, but only seems to address autoconf. As long as projects used a hand-made Makefile.in, it was, in my experience, usually possible to skip running autoconf and edit the Makefile and config.h manually, if the autoconf script turned out to be completely inadequate. It was the introduction of automake that turned makefiles into an inscrutable mess, where everything happened through four levels of variable expansion.