This is true for Autotools projects, but isn't true for CMake, Bazel, Meson, and others. Let's take CMake for example, which is IMHO the most popular build tool: most modern CMake projects prefer to use the Ninja build system over Make.

And coming back to Autotools, some of the largest Autotools projects (see the GNOME ecosystem) has been moving/moved to Meson, which can also be used to generate Ninja rules instead of Makefiles.

CMake Generators: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/manual/cmake-generators.... Meson: https://mesonbuild.com/ Bazel: https://bazel.build/

GNOME and Meson: https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/GnomeGoals/MesonPorting