The most important thing is to put all the compiler flags behind standard variables. This is 80% of what autoconf/automake does. The standard variables for C programs are
CPPFLAGS = # e.g. -I and -D preprocess options
CFLAGS = # various ad hoc compiler switches
LDFLAGS = # e.g. -L options
LDLIBS = # e.g. -l options
SOFLAGS = # -shared or -bundle -undefined dynamic_lookup
(NOTE: SOFLAGS is less standard--i.e. not in GNU style guide or GNU make manual--but perfectly fits the pattern and extremely useful to specify independently. You'll often find a variable like this used, if not the same name. IME SOFLAGS it the most common name.)
Library dependencies should follow a similar pattern:
LIBFOO_CPPFLAGS = # e.g. -I/usr/local/foo/include
LIBFOO_CFLAGS =
LIBFOO_LDFLAGS = # e.g. -L/usr/local/foo/lib
LIBFOO_LDLIBS = -lfoo
To make it easier to control feature-specific options without overriding all other defaults, you should do likewise for feature groups:
PIC_CFLAGS = -fPIC
...
PTHREAD_LDLIBS = -lpthread
...
WARN_CFLAGS = -Wall -Wextra
If you want to get really fancy, you can use top-level MY* variables so people can easily append flags without overriding existing variables.
Then for most basic target recipes you can pre-compose all the flags to make your rules simpler:
ALL_CPPFLAGS = $(PIC_CPPFLAGS) $(LIBFOO_CPPFLAGS) $(WARN_CPPFLAGS) $(CPPFLAGS) $(MYCPPFLAGS)
ALL_CFLAGS = $(PIC_CFLAGS) $(LIBFOO_CFLAGS) $(WARN_CFLAGS) $(CFLAGS) $(MYCFLAGS)
ALL_LDFLAGS = $(PIC_LDFLAGS) $(LIBFOO_LDFLAGS) $(WARN_LDFLAGS) $(LDFLAGS) $(MYLDFLAGS)
ALL_LDLIBS = $(MYLDLIBS) $(LDLIBS) $(LIBFOO_LDLIBS) $(WARN_LDLIBS) $(PTHREAD_LDLIBS)
.o.c:
$(CC) $(ALL_CFLAGS) $(ALL_CPPFLAGS) -c -o $@ $
Because of the ubiquity of GCC and clang, and because of the commonality across most modern Unix platforms (e.g. SOFLAGS will be "-shared" on all BSD- and SysV-derived systems, including Linux, and "-bundle -undefined dynamic_lookup" on macOS), the above will allow people to build your software without modifying the actual Makefile in almost all scenarios. It will certainly make packagers' jobs easier.
For installation you should always use the standard prefixes
DESTDIR = # temporary root to assist in packaging
prefix = /usr/local
bindir = $(prefix)/bin
datadir = $(prefix)/share
includedir = $(prefix)/include
libdir = $(prefix)/lib
sysconfdir = $(prefix)/etc
and install targets should be written like
$(DESTDIR)$(libdir)/libacme.so: libacme.so
...
This may seem like alot of boilerplate, but the important thing is that it's very simple and time-tested. Autogenerating just this basic boilerplate is overkill and adds unnecessary indirection and complexity. You can get fancier than this scheme, but avoid the temptation as much as you can unless it's an obvious win--remedies a regular, concrete issue that is actually resulting in significant wasted effort. For complex builds (e.g. multiple targets where flags might not have the same semantics across target rules), consider splitting the build into multiple Makefiles. You can create a convenience wrapper, but at least the sub Makefiles will be reusable by packagers or contributors without having to modify anything directly. It's not ideal but there is no ideal solution. (I once heavily advocated non-recursive make, but these days I'm much more averse to complexity.)
There's no easy answer for Windows, particularly because NMake uses significantly different syntax for some constructs. For really basic builds the above might actually work as long as you stick to NMake-compatible syntax. With the advent of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) you could consider requiring WSL for the build (so you have access to POSIX-compatible shell and Make) and perhaps providing a wrapper Makefile with more convenient defaults for compiling with Visual Studio (which is very much still a command-line driven compiler). Requiring clang-cl might be even easier.
For simple stuff IME autotools and CMake are just overkill.[1] For complex stuff they often won't be sufficient, anyhow.[2] So the important thing is to layer your build so the maximum amount of build code can be reused by somebody with unforeseen needs; and reused in a way that is obvious and transparent so their tweaks can be simple. Stick to convention as much as possible. Even if you don't use autotools, autotools has created de facto conventions wrt build variables that will be intuitive to all packagers. Please don't invent your own naming scheme! (It's annoying when someone uses 'PREFIX' instead of 'prefix'. There's logic to the autotools scheme. Uppercase variable are for [build] flags used in rule recipes, lowercase for [installation] paths used to define rule targets and dependencies. Exceptions like DESTDIR are well-known and few.)
Always be mindful of the needs of people doing embedded work--cross-compiling, complex build flags, etc. But don't bend over backwards. All you really need to do is remove obstructions and the necessity to patch. They're used to writing build wrappers, but patching is a maintenance nightmare and impedes tracking upstream.
Ideally you would support out-of-tree builds, but in reality few packages support this properly (even autotools or CMake projects), and if you're not regularly doing out-of-tree builds your build probably won't work out-of-the-box anyhow. That's why I didn't mention the use of macros like VPATH, top_srcdir, etc, in your rules. Do that at your discretion, but beware of descending down the rabbit hole.
The same thing applies to automatic feature detection--unless you're regularly building on esoteric targets your feature detection is unlikely to work out of the box, and bit rot happens quickly as platforms evolve.[3] Don't put too much effort into this; just make sure it's easy to manually toggle feature availability and that the defaults work on the most common platforms and environments. Maximize benefits, minimize costs, but don't think you can automate everything away.
All those fancy builds people tout are ridiculously brittle in reality. People just don't realize it because they're only using the builds on what are in fact relatively homogenous environments. Most of the effort is wasted, and build complexity (including bespoke build environments) is a big reason why people don't reuse software as much as they could.
[1] Indeed, for simple builds it's not much of a burden to provide and maintain a POSIX build and a Visual Studio project file build.
[2] For CMake this is especially true. For feature detection CMake often requires actually updating your version of CMake. That's a gigantic PITA. Anyhow, most feature detection can be done inline using the preprocessor, or by simply defaulting to being available (this is 2018, not 1988--there's much more commonality today.) And as long as your feature-detection macros are controllable from build-time flags, people can easily work around issues by explicitly toggling availability. Thus, the autotools convention of using "#ifdef FEATURE_FOO" for feature flags is bad advice. Always use boolean flags like "#if FEATURE_FOO", and only define FEATURE_FOO in config.h-like files if not already defined. That allows people to do, e.g., "MYCPPFLAGS=-DFEATURE_FOO=0" to override feature detection as necessary.
[3] Autoconf's feature checking (check the feature, not the version) sounds robust in practice, but you'd be surprised how many ways it can break, or how difficult writing a properly robust feature check is. Plus, especially on Linux people expect a feature to work at run-time if the kernel supports it, regardless of whether glibc had a wrapper at build time or has it at run time. These issues are where you'll spend much of your time, and this can't be automated. You can't foresee all these issues! Focus on making it easy to supplement or work around your build!