Great, someone managed to get a build system to work for a project. That's nice. I'm sure there are a bunch of cases where even hand-written makefiles are being used to the same effect. Does that mean that any of those tools are free from any design issue or maintainability problem?
That's a good question! I think a good way to figure that out is to publish a paper about what they did, how it solved their non-trivial problem, and then invite others to try to use their tool and techniques to solve their problem.
In other words, you're asking a question that criticizes the mechanism that would answer that question. It's a legitimate question, but a poor reason to disregard what they did.
