Comment by IshKebab
No, CMake can do everything Autotools does, but a hell of a lot simpler and without checking for a gazillion flags and files that you don't actually need to but you're checking them anyway because you copied the script from a someone who copied the script from... all the way back to the 90s when C compilers actually existed that didn't have stdint.h or whatever.
CMake is easy to upgrade. There are binary downloads. You can even install it with pip (although recently the Python people in their usual wisdom have broken that).
CMake can't do everything autotools does, but the stuff autotools does which CMake doesn't isn't relevant anymore in today's world.
The fundamental curse of build systems is that they are inherently complex beasts that hardly anybody has to work with full-time, and so hardly anybody learns them to the necessary level of detail.
The only way out of this is to simplify the problem space. Sometimes for real (by reducing the number of operating systems and CPU architectures that are relevant -- e.g. CMake vs. Autotools) and sometimes by somewhat artificially restricting yourself to a specific niche (e.g. Cargo).