I agree with you that less commands means less trouble. But see my other comment, this fixes a libtool related problem, such as https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-dupes/pull/220. Since Homebrew is now remove .la related stuff (which is a good thing), it may become a wider problem.

Also, "./configure", "make", "make install" triple commands have been standard practice for building autotools-based source since the very beginning, so this also looks natural :)