To be fair, these steps can go wrong when the project doesn't make clear that there are a lot of implicit dependencies for the configure step to even work (and then make can sometimes break if those implicit dependencies aren't the expected version).
But to your point, there are a lot of projects for which those steps work just fine.
Sure and in fact it did happen with one of the software i was trying to build, but the (first) error is usually along the lines of "cannot open include file foobarlib.h" - so i can search for that library (and many package managers let you search for the header files directly) or "this struct doesn't have that field" (common with -IIRC- libjpeg that at some point made some structs opaque). The latter is a bit more work (fixing the code) but it is also very rare.
Indeed which is why I like rust so much. The best thing they did was to make every program statically linked, so the build process succeeds 99% of the time. The only time I’ve had it fail for me really is when a project depends on OpenSSL and I don’t have it configured to it’s liking. Those time bring me back to the “make” days when I’d have to spend an afternoon installing some tool with all its dependencies, and even then sometimes I’d sometimes give up in frustration.
The problem with static linking is that if all you have is a binary (e.g. closed source program) you do not get any new fixes or features from the libraries you depend on.
For example many early 2000s games that used SDL 1.x can be made to work on modern Linux simply by removing the SDL so file they were bundled with and let them use the one the system provides (most common issue would be audio but also mode setting or full screen support).
This isn't a thing only on Linux btw, SDL games that have an old DLL can also have issues on Windows (in fact a game of mine was like that :-P) but be made to work by simply replacing the DLL with a newer one.
That’s surely a problem but I try to avoid closed source software for this very reason. Obviously there are a million and one ways closed source software can leave you high and dry, and static linking is one of those but really I think the operative word driving the sadness here is “closed” rather than “static”.
This can be an issue with open source programs as well from a practical perspective. For example let's say i modified Gtk to use a sane file dialog - i'd rather replace the system installed shared object once and have everything use it rather than recompile everything that uses Gtk.
