I can sympathize. Years ago (more than two decades) the situation was already pretty crazy. I managed to use some version of GNU make for building Visual C++ code.

The Microsoft CL.EXE compiler knew absolutely nothing without being told. Unlike /path/to/whatever/gcc, it doesn't know where its headers or libraries are, nothing.

In the Makefile, had to specify all the include and library paths in the SDK installation.

It's like trying to use GCC's cc1 directly or something.

Since that time there have been many more releases of Visual Studio and the SDK, all of them moving targets without a doubt. Yikes!