I just mean, when you join an existing project, most of that would already be set up.

In every project I’ve been on, I was asked to ramp up in the first few weeks by fixing small bugs here and there in the core codebase, not by setting up CI/makefiles/build infra/etc...

I actually think I might be totally missing your point, since I don’t really understand what you mean or how you arrived at the conclusion that it’s a sign of dysfunction.

I hope that's how it would work for me- getting the task of setting up makefiles on the first day- before I know anything about the codebase- would feel pretty daunting, to say the least.