I agree that autocrap is the worst build system in use now. However writing plain Makefiles is not an option for projects that are more complex than hello world. It is very difficult to write them portably (between various OSes, compilers and make implementations) and to support cross compiling. That’s why developers used to write configure scripts that evolved to autocrap.

Happily we have better alternatives like cmake and meson (I personally prefer cmake and don’t like meson, but it is also a good build system solving the complexity problem).