Porting a bunch of libraries in the @gnome stack to Meson is a good way to realise how bad the autotools builds really are all across the board. Stuff that was cargo-culted 15 years ago; ad hoc hacks for long since dead platforms that probably worked for one release; hacks for making distcheck work at the last minute before the release deadline. If anything, just preparing to port to Meson is a good chance of doing some spring cleaning.