Developers fall in to approximately two camps; they either want implicit build tools which do "what they expect", or explicit build tools which don't "do anything surprising". This is a good example of a developer who expects implicit behavior, but has got frustrated and hasn't specified exactly what they expect and considered why that wouldn't work for everyone.
Isn't the real advantage of using things like build systems the ability to customize the output build? You don't really see all this stuff going on behind the scenes but stuff like autotools and auto-generating Makefiles is much of the reason why lot of libraries can run almost anywhere.