But in practice, the tooling for making those tools never got very good. (That is, in my opinion - there is at least one commenter here who replied to me about actually liking autotools, which is fair enough, just not my opinion.)
So while fully recognizing the value of the old tools that will always exist, for new useful tools, I'm very happy to see this renaissance of writing them in rust. In my opinion, it is much easier to build them, dig into their implementation, and contribute to them (especially without introducing security vulnerabilities or data races).
Where I do absolutely agree, and what I do wish for is that more of this were being done under the auspices of an organization, like how the `ls` most of us are using is likely maintained by either GNU or one of the BSD organizations.
But if what the comment I replied to meant by "capable of maintaining them myself" was about having an organizational structure where they could become an official maintainer of the official project rather than needing to fork it if the owner becomes unavailable, then yep, that's a great point about these single-owner projects.
But my original interpretation was about the difficulty of maintaining the code. To me, these rust tools are a huge improvement in that way.