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Exactly my thought.

Please leave autotools alone and don’t “improve” it.

It’s not like there are tons of build systems already and if someone is so keen in a heavy-weight build system, they can use Bazel which is so bloated that it doesn’t build on any 32-bit target in Debian.

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There is nothing wrong with improving, just make sure you have a frozen version that can handle the old cruft, some software is so stable that you wouldn't dare to update, I have some software I made myself that does what it was designed to do and never give problems. However it does not keep one from ever going forward and design new ways of solving the same problems. So my advice would be freeze and move on.

Bazel is obviously an insane idea, but autotools is as "heavy-weight" a build system as they come. I struggle to imagine something more convoluted and bloated than autotools.

It's convoluted because of the efforts to avoid bloating by e.g. reusing the macro processor from sendmail rather than writing its own.

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