If the alternative you are hinting at is CMake, I can't really agree with you.

I tried it recently and was shocked at how awful the syntax and usability was.

It's begging for a tool to auto-detect your dependencies from source. I was trying to port an existing project to it and I gave up when I realised that I'd have to manually create about 30 CMakeList.txt files or whatever they call them.

Meanwhile during the same weekend, autoconf allowed me to build gcc from source with three commands. I know I know, I'm not supposed to like autoconf, and the orthodoxy is that it is garbage ...

It seems every generation ignores the previous generation's tools and invents worse ones to replace them.

If this continues we'll soon go back to banging rocks and sticks together.