Autotools was a perfectly reasonable way of solving 1993 problems with 1993 tools. Whether it still makes any sense in 2023 a different matter... Having said that, given the choice between a non-working autoconf build scheme, and a non-working cmake build scheme, I prefer the former, but that may just be me getting old and lazy. Obviously, a working setup of anything would be much preferrable, but that seems like hopeless case if one is using anything other than the most popular Linux distro at the moment...