I believe that his point is that the world would be a better place without those 22,198 tools rather than with the gigantic mess that having them creates.

I myself am somewhat amused by the paragraph,

"...Later the configure scripts became more ambitious, and as an almost predictable application of the Peter Principle, rather than standardize Unix to eliminate the need for them, somebody wrote a program, autoconf, to write the configure scripts."

The key phrase being "rather than standardize Unix". Anyone want to count how many Unix standards there are?

He goes on about libtool with,

"...yet the 31,085 lines of configure for libtool still check if <sys/stat.h> and <stdlib.h> exist, even though the Unixen, which lacked them, had neither sufficient memory to execute libtool nor disks big enough for its 16-MB source code."

I don't know if AIX had sys/stat.h or stdlib.h (actually, I believe it did), but I do know those machines I worked on certainly had enough resources to run libtool; I did it. Because without libtool, building shared libraries on AIX was an exercise in crazy. (Almost as crazy as m4.)

http://stromberg.dnsalias.org/~strombrg/AIX-shared-libs.html

I don't know about Poul-Henning Kamp, but I didn't have the luxury of spending those 15 or so years using a single flavor of BSD.