I feel like I "get" make, but when you have autotools in front of it you end up with stuff like [0], and Makefiles kicking off other Makefiles.

It's not the worst thing to ever grace the planet by a long shot, but I think it suffers from the same problem that bash scripts have. Everything is string-ly typed and you can only build up a thing to a certain level of complexity easily.

There's of course a lot of requirements in systems software, of course. And a lot of difficulty stems more from the C ecosystem's difficulties with packaging (where are the C equivalents to "environments" you find in Python/Ruby so you don't have to pass every lib in explicitly?)

I think there's some useful opportunities somewhere here.

[0]: https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/Makefil...