In my personal experience, extensions written in C don't necessarily compile at first attempt because the dependency management there is even worse. May be it fails with a missing openssl or readline library and I have to go find whatever OS specific thingy I need to do to recover.

C/C++ have no equivalent of npm/bundler/pip. Instead there are incompatible flavors of Makefiles for incompatible C compilers. It's a hard problem space to work in.