Maybe because they got bundled into distros soon and as a critical dependency. For a long time as the internet ramped, portability meant you could pretty quickly edit a few header files or Makefile to make it compile for your particular hardware/OS. But then as the perl build scripts showed and autoconf tried to spread, it became expected to download and compile with no changes. In the context of a distro, maybe that put pressure to provide quick work around to keep old code compiling with minimal changes to the actual source?
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