Although I do agree in general with this sentence, I also think that we should not pull down good ideas when they come. Anjuta was an excellent idea, which carried a lot of potential improvements for both itself and Autotools, and it’s a pity that it lacks maintainers at the moment.
I have tried to replace it with GNOME Builder, but the only thing I get from installing GNOME Builder is that I am forced to install flatpak, although I hate not using pacman for installing packages (once you install flatpak on Arch a lot of duplicate packages will appear in GNOME Software, one copy coming from Arch the other coming from flathub), and in my opinion AUR is a much better way to deal with bleeding edge software. Besides that, total lack of support for Autotools, so useless for me. And since I am firm in not wanting flatpak installed on my machine, I have always to uninstall GNOME Builder after installing GNOME.
Nothing against GNOME’s way of building software, but it should be clear that Anjuta and GNOME Builder have different scopes. The first is a general purpose IDE written for GNOME that relies on GNU Autotools, the second is an IDE designed to build software that complies with GNOME’s current way of building software.
EDIT I wanted to test if things were still like that after my comment, so I just installed GNOME Builder on Arch again, and it did not force me to install flatpak this time, so I will have to take back my previous statement.
SECOND EDIT Autotools support has improved a lot since last time I tried GNOME Builder, so I take back most of my comment.