Yeah, think of how programming languages invent and reinvent stuff to handle the interaction with Make and native libraries, how we have generators of generators of Makefiles... Heck, even Docker's use case is mostly because of the living hell that is C stuff.
Yeah the absurdity of autoconf tooling is enough evidence by itself
I agree. It has its merits, but it's hard for me to get around my visceral reaction to the fact it just bombs on filenames with spaces in them.
You can escape spaces in makefiles.
Sure... but if you have spaces in filenames, and filenames in variables, what happens then?