C/C++ is HR-newspeak out of the 1990s(at the time it was not clear that anyone would still want to use C and MSVC did move their compiler to C++).

It signals that the speaker doesn't understand that the two are different languages with very different communities.

I don't really think that C users are entirely immune to dependency hell, if that's what OP meant, though. It is orthogonal.

As a user, I do believe it sucks when you depend on something that is not included by default on all target platforms(and you fail to include it and maintain it within your source tree*).

What part of the build process is different for C?

I explained why C/C++ rubbed op the wrong way. It has nothing to do with a build process.

It is probably true that more average C programs can be built with plain Makefiles or even without a Makefile than C++, though.

You can of course add dependencies on configure scripts, m4, cmake, go, python or rust when building a plain self-contained C program and indeed many do.

Well the post is about build tools, so I assumed we were talking about that.