FWIW, my mileage definitely varied: autotools--which is quite easy if you bother to learn how it works and is then almost infinitely flexible--has pretty much never failed me (I think there was one incident for a while related to building stuff for iOS? regardless this was fixed long ago), but I have had to file and participate in a number of bugs on cargo, most of which are still open :/, and I haven't even developed anything in Rust myself yet... I've merely tried to compile and use stuff other people wrote and run into myriad ridiculous problems.
lol, as a distro package maintainer, I've literally stopped packaging and stopped using software that uses autotools. Given me meson or give me a software compiled in a respectable language, or preferably, death. I'd take cargo and its crates.io namespace warts every day over autotools, and twice on every day of the week.
No dang, I don't care about the spirit of the site when absolute ludicrous mindrot garbage is up voted here constantly. You'll note on the Wayland thread that, despite being the 30th Wayland thread, the only substantive reply agreed with me. It's a joke.
Don't worry, I'm changing my password to a random guid, you'll be free of me in 45 seconds.