Admittedly, my feels are that we socially tend to overly emphasize the brutalist shades of Darwinianism, of natural selection as a competitive pressure.
Evolution though is a much broader game of adaption, of finding niches. It's about capturing energy. And having diverse & creative means to adapt & succeed, less one finds oneself trapped only able to survive in a overly narrow environment. Evolutions greater story is more about over specialization being doom than it is about refining the exact perfect match; the perfect matches are amazing & elegant but rarely able to stick around.
I don't really know my stance here. But it does feel like a call for authority. Why are we still diverse? Why still have complexity? Can't someone free us of the diversity of options and crown a champion, decree how it will be? That sort of resembles Darwinianism on the small, but in the big, we get change & evolution from having non-static environments, from having many ways to shape and be shaped, all about.
That shift from dynamic to static systems, when evolution peaks, is usually not far from when that stasis turns to ossification & rot, decay & the fall. We probably should cleanup some & not support a million options, for our own sake, but this notion the past had of supporting a deeply rich & diverse technical ecosystem I find enormously beautiful.
Anyhow, I forget how often autoconf needs to be run. I think often many projects would work fine for aomg time using the same generated conf across many many builds? There's focus here on the silliness of re-running config again and again and again, but I'm not sure when technically it's required; it seems more like habit & ritual than a need?