I'm a C fan, too, but not when it comes to dependencies. In a world where using someone's library typically requires one or more of (a) having everyone compiling your code also manually compile the library, (b) hoping the library has found its way into N different OS package managers, and (c) vendoring requiring manual maintenance, you end up with a lot of real world C and C++ code reimplementing basic things that would be better done in a library, because importing a library is too much work. This sucks - certainly it's possible for libraries to be too small, dependency graphs too convoluted, and you can see some of that on npm, but C/C++ are so far on the other end of the spectrum that it's hardly worth thinking of.
Not trying to say it isn't painful, just that people live with it and are still productive. And by not mandating a single one you get several experiments. Autoconf could be one. pkg-config another. The *bsds do interesting things with a particular dialect of makefiles. Even Microsoft has a few: the wdk build system, vs/msbuild, nmake... All of these have ups and downs but few of them are outright "wrong", we live with them and I wouldn't want to see any one mandated...
What's wrong with reimplementing basic things? Dependencies are points of fragility; I'm happy to pay a little extra redundancy in exchange for greater resilience.
