[taylanub]

Late reply but:

All of the things you list are annoyances with crud that exists to satisfy this or that use-case which I suppose you personally don't need, which doesn't mean they don't have purposes. I would also say they are all minor annoyances. Your builds run faster than a ./configure script? Not building particularly large projects I suppose. Installing autotools? Big deal! I don't know when one needs to write m4, but the Makefile.am format looks rather clean and minimal to me; I don't see how you could have something much cleaner without losing a lot of generality. And having to delve into the guts of some obscure system is exactly what I had to do a few times because some piece of software refuses to keep with the convention and just use Autotools.

The documentation you ask for is idealistic and unrealistic. GNU Autotools are free software, and with decades-old proven maturity; I see no reason not to use them. The only pseudo-reasons I see are NIH, FUD, etc.; the usual.

GNU Guix (and before that, Nix) is fundamentally different from all other package managers, so that analogy makes no sense here unless you have some radically different innovative build system.