Yes, I used autotools[0]. It's definitely hairier than plain make, but you get a lot of useful features on top of it. There's thousands of examples all over the internet so it's easy to reference them.

I like the elegance of pure make, and do use it when appropriate, but I wouldn't really want to reimplement the things autotools does myself in it.

[0]: https://github.com/jbboehr/handlebars.c/blob/master/configur...