No, CMake can do everything Autotools does, but a hell of a lot simpler and without checking for a gazillion flags and files that you don't actually need to but you're checking them anyway because you copied the script from a someone who copied the script from... all the way back to the 90s when C compilers actually existed that didn't have stdint.h or whatever.

CMake is easy to upgrade. There are binary downloads. You can even install it with pip (although recently the Python people in their usual wisdom have broken that).