What a lot of people forget is that in the early days of Linux there was no software that targeted it. Everything you would want to run on Linux was intended to run on something else like Solaris, BSD, AT&T Sytem V, SCO, AIX or something else. As a result, Linux APIs were the most generic flavor of Unix possible. Almost every thing meant for a Unix would compile and run on it and there was rarely a dependency problem.

I still miss that.

Even MS hates nmake. Visual Studio has had native support for cmake since 2017.

Coming to market about 20 years late: https://jonathangarrett.livejournal.com/32686.html