> Compared to traditional C or C++ projects it's madness.

Those projects typically rely on an external package manager to handle their dependencies for them. Apt, yum, etc. Otherwise you end up in dependency hell trying to get ./configure to find the development headers of whatever it needs. I don't miss those days. Rust/Cargo is a godsend.

It may be better from a DX perspective, but it's pure pain for distros like Debian who don't want to use cargo at build time to fetch arbitrary dependencies and instead use vetted system versions.