Not trying to start a flame war here but… who cares?
I’ve published open source while working at faang myself and they all have internal build tools, version sets, etc.
Plenty of employees still do tons of open-source.
He's still making a valid point that dependency management & build systems for C & derivatives are a shit show.
autotools is great, meson and bazel similary. but people quirking around with cmake alone, or conan or other toys cannot be helped much.
I assume you are joking. Autotools is a slow-as-molasses system (running autoreconf could take half of your build's wall time!) designed for 1980s unix wars (with support for anything not resembling 1980s unix C programs being an awkward bolt-on), complete with an unusually hostile syntax and multiple levels of inefficient interpreters, all optimized to encourage cargo-cult copy-paste programming. It was barely tolerable at the turn of the century, when everyone used it for lack of a good alternative. For a while, its one saving grace was decent support for cross-compiling. But using it for a new project today is insane.
In fact, I just built my own artifact server where I store vcpkg exports and remote Bazel dependencies. That way, statically linking in opencv is as easy as http_archive with a template BUILD file.
Mediapipe and TensorFlow use it, for example.