In your MS-DOS / turbo pascal example, there are no third party dependencies. There is just the platform and the libraries that come with the product when you install it, and your code built on top of that. In this scenario, you end up reinventing a lot of wheels in your own app code, although the advantage is that all the code does exactly what you want and nothing ever breaks due to some complicated dependency hell upgrades.

You can do this today with any newfangled languages, just avoid third party libraries, or at least use them as a last resort, and choose options that are stable.

Autoconf is just a complicated system for finding and detecting third party libraries. If an application just uses the standard library, the build system can be very simple and reliable.

Most of your pain is actually due to 'package managers', not build systems per se.