> This is how we end up with tools on top of make like configure, autoconf
In the case of configure and autoconf, it isn't.
Those were created to solve a problem which a Makefile by itself wasn't able to do, which is portability to the plethora of unix systems and a few others.
Nowadays a lot of software is not written with high portability in mind, and much of it is Linux only, but at the time Autoconf came out (1991) Linux barely existed, and there was no dominant unix-like OS. There were many different ones.
Autoconf was quite refreshing as an end user. To make software portable so that people could build and run it on their systems, especially systems the software author didn't know about or couldn't test on. The consistent ability to run "./configure && make" and have it just work was a big improvement over the ad-hoc myriad ways of configuring downloaded software that were common at the time.
In the case of configure and autoconf, it isn't.
Those were created to solve a problem which a Makefile by itself wasn't able to do, which is portability to the plethora of unix systems and a few others.
Nowadays a lot of software is not written with high portability in mind, and much of it is Linux only, but at the time Autoconf came out (1991) Linux barely existed, and there was no dominant unix-like OS. There were many different ones.
Autoconf was quite refreshing as an end user. To make software portable so that people could build and run it on their systems, especially systems the software author didn't know about or couldn't test on. The consistent ability to run "./configure && make" and have it just work was a big improvement over the ad-hoc myriad ways of configuring downloaded software that were common at the time.