I don't disagree with that general premise but IMO autotools being (gradually?) abandoned is logical. It served its purpose. Not saying it's still not very useful in the darker shadows of technology but for a lot of stuff people choose Zig, Rust, Golang etc. today, with fairly good reasons too, and those PLs usually have fairly good packaging and dependency management and building subsystems built-in.

Furthermore, there really has to be a better way to do what autotools is doing, no? Sure, there are some situations where you only have some bare sh shell and nothing much else but I'd venture to say that in no less than 90% of all cases you can very easily have much more stuff installed -- like the `just` task runner tool, for example, that solves most of the problems that `make` usually did.

If we are talking in terms of our age, we also have to take into account that there's too much software everywhere! I believe some convergence has to start happening. There is such a thing as too much freedom. We are dispersing so much creative energy for almost no benefit of humankind...