That was my immediate reaction here: one of the reasons the xz backdoor was possible is that nobody is going to question the idea of shipping a tarball to spare users from having to touch Autotools.
Of course I wouldn't think of manually hacking together Makefiles since I come from languages that have either the One True Build Tool or a standard for packaging and defining build backends.
I think the author's aversion to build tools trying (and apparently failing) to make everyone's life easier is more a statement about how much C/C++ have suffered from not having a standard for packages.