![](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/1ff4618d-d269-4bc6-9431-91fe8f135d20.png)
That was my immediate reaction here: one of the reasons this was possible is that nobody is going to question the idea of shipping a tarball to spare users from having to touch Autotools.
Of course I wouldn't think of manually hacking together Makefiles since I come from languages that have either the One True Build Tool or a standard for packaging and defining build backends.
I think the author's aversion to build tools trying (and apparently failing) to make everyone's life easier is more a statement about how much C/C++ have suffered from not having a standard for packages.
Such a cool idea!