> Linux, BSD, Darwin, and Cygwin are the targets today

They're the most popular targets today. They certainly weren't yesterday, and very probably won't be tomorrow. I've seen a lot of changes over the decades and the attitude that "nobody will ever need more than 640 k" has always been popular. I also say this from the point of view of someone who makes a living with porting software to a reasonably popular platform "today" that is not one of those listed. Also someone who has spent many years doing "maintenance programming" as opposed new development on the leading edge. "Maintenance" accounts for something like 80% of revenue in the software industry, and the old machines in maintenance mode are not always identical to the new sleek affairs on developer's desks.

> 1. autoconf is awful to learn.

Yes. Like vim, it has a learning curve. It's not actually that bad, and the internet is chock full of documentation and examples. It's about on a par with alternatives like CMake and meson in terms of learning difficulty.

> 3. autoconf's usefulness here is completely undermined by automake, as changing Makefile.am requires rerunning autoreconf, which then requires rerunning configure. So, developers must constantly rerun the configure script, even though nothing about their system environment has materially changed. For example, this happens when a new source file is created and added to Makefile.am.

Ah, you got stuck at point 1. You don't have to re-run autoconf after re-running automate (autoreconf knows this), so you don't have to re-run configure. The makefiles generated by automake know this. That's why when you just type "make" after modifying a Makefile.am it will do the right thing automatically, and that is to re-run the config.status script which contains all the autodetected configuration already cached. It's seriously faster than running configure although the printed output is identical (because configure itself generates and runs that script).

> 4. Perhaps the most egregious missing weakness from TFA is acknowledgement that configure scripts are horrifically slow. It's 2022 and developers have their time wasted by configure checking whether printf() exists.

Yes. You pay the price for portability. You have argued "but I don't port my software why should I pay the price? That only helps other people and there's nothing in it for me". OK, fair enough.

> 5. automake documentation discourages developers from globbing source files in source directories, and insists they list them individually.

The documentation also says why. It's a well-reasoned argument. Also, despite it being a pain in the butt it turns out that explicitly showing your work is a benefit in the long run.

> 6. The complex interdependencies between generated files is nigh-impossible to understand and reason about.

They're a DAG; they should be straightforward for someone with a background in programming to grasp. The relationships are there a priori but the autotools document them and make them explicit.

> 7. libtool is completely braindead

OK. Agree with you there. Libtool was a godsend in its time. It's improved massively (yes, I see the complaints about frustrations with it over a decade ago) but it's largely superfluous today.