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This is similar to the evolution from ant to maven for Java developers. With ant, you gave the steps necessary to build your system, an imperative approach. With maven, you instead describe the shape of your system, and it figures out the steps.

Projects become more uniform as a result, and developers spend more time building the projects instead of maintaining build systems.

My only concern is the knowledge or experience that's lost as a result; larger and larger groups of developers have a smaller and a smaller understanding of the tools, environment, and subtle filesystem dependencies that systems tend to have, putting the experience in in-the-field debugging into a relative tiny number of cutting edge high-priced consultants.

By the way, I'm available. ;)

Karma cops: I'm not trying to post a job lead; I've got plenty of employment, thank you.