"Later the configure scripts became more ambitious, and as an almost predictable application of the Peter Principle, rather than standardize Unix to eliminate the need for them, somebody wrote a program, autoconf, to write the configure scripts."

I'm not sure I understand how the Peter Principle applies here? Autoconf seems a rational solution in the economic sense: to standardise Unix, you need to have lots of influence to effect buy-in, whereas to write autoconf, you need a big dose of hacking talent. If you have the latter and not the former...