The LibreOffice build system (which is plain GNU Make, without generated unreadable intermediate build files) does all these and more. Doing the same with autotools would be a nightmare.
... as we would have needed for CMake or Autotools. It might have worked with the former for something as complex as LibreOffice, but GNU make being so simple/basic and stable over the years was a big plus: Im sure even with CMake LibreOffice would have had fun with lots of small cornercase regressions.