I have had problems with C, but building my code was never one of them. You are right that I have only used GCC, Clang, and Visual Studio.

I thought they use M4 because they were doing sophisticated preprocessing?

I misremembered; M4sh (which uses m4 to generate portable bourne-ish shell scripts) is what was the lowest-common-denominator for autoconf.

Perhaps C was a poor example. I just mean “statically compiled language where files become objects and objects get linked into executables/libraries and this is done by a build system”.

Perhaps rust would have been a better example as there is less variety in build systems.