Would you rather your build failed during configure or 10 minutes into the build, where parallelism will make the compile still print tons of things after the error message?
Perhaps the error printing during a parallel build could also be improved somehow.
Especially since configure doesn't actually make anything any faster even in most cases where it _does_ detect errors. It aborts at the first error. So when I'm missing packages for example, I will wait half a minute while `./configure` runs, then it errors with a single missing package, then I will install that package and re-run `./configure`, wait another half a minute until it prints another single missing package, etc. Repeat until I have all packages.
I hate autotools so much. Configure scripts should either run in parallel, or cache its results, or both (ideally both), and they should report as many errors as it can before aborting.