Nope, autotools is actually the worst.

There is no way in hell anyone reasonable could say that Autotools is better than CMake.

I've seen programs replicate autotools in their Makefiles. That's actually worse. I've also used the old Visual Studio build tooling.

Autotools is terrible, but it's not the worst.

Configure-make is easier to use for someone else. Configuring a cmake based project is slightly harder. In every other conceivable way I agree 100% (until someone can convince me otherwise)

My experience with cmake, though dated, is that it's simpler because it simply cannot do what autotools can do.

It really smelled of "oh I can do this better", and you rewrite it, and as part of rewriting it you realise oh, this is why the previous solution was complicated. It's because the problem is actually more complex than I though.

And then of course there's the problem where you need to install on an old release. But the thing you want to install requires a newer cmake (autotools doesn't have this problem because it's self contained). But this is an old system that you cannot upgrade, because the vendor support contract for what the server runs would be invalidated. So now you're down a rabbit hole of trying to get a new version of cmake to build on an unsupported system. Sigh. It's less work to just try to construct `gcc` commands yourself, even for a medium sized project. Either way, this is now your whole day, or whole week.

If only the project had used autotools.

And presumably the measure by which they are judged to be reasonable or not is if they prefer CMake over Autotools, correct? :D