Not OP, but its not just that C/C++ lacks modules. I think that is missing the real issue. Any complicated program probably needs a custom developed tool to build it. As a simple example, imagine a program that uses a database - you want to keep the sources as SQL and generate classes from them. Thats a custom build step.

Its just that in some languages and build systems (Node, Maven), we have abstracted this away by calling them plugins and they probably come from the same group that made the library you need.

No such pluginsystem exists, as far as I am aware, for makefiles.