[jeroenhd]

I don't know, I've seen plenty of build tool bulk in native code. Configure scripts, automake, make, cmake, meson, and plenty of others that are even more obscure. Most of them integrate with some kind of project specific shell script (that claims to be sh compatible as long as sh means bash) to make thing easier.

The languages where the build tools remain static are often also the languages where innovation lags behind or where no real alternative exists. C and C++ projects often use standards that go back literal decades for compatibility reasons, and rely on apt/dnf/pacman to install their dependencies. Java is stuck on nine year old tech in most production systems because what if upgrading to Java 9 will break AncientProprietaryHackedTogetherLibrary. Python seems to be moving away from the pip vs conda wars, though the ML space seems to be reintroducing conda into newer projects; to run popular software, I've had to install at least two conda packages and pip (and then disable the auto load in my bash shell because all of them made the shell prompt take literal seconds to come up).

Go/Rust/.NET and other more recent languages have a single package manager+compiler+build tool+publishing system combination that's changing so rapidly no alternative could be written. I guess you can manually script calls to the compiler, linker, and download scripts, but I doubt this will be maintainable. I wonder how long it'll take for GCC Rust and official Rust will run into trouble in this space.

The Javascript ecosystem certainly seems to be the wildest when it comes to reinventing the wheel (and inventing new steps) to make new build systems, but every language either has too much of that or too little.