They're impossible to implement in Make, which is without exaggeration the world's most widely-used build tool. Even CMake has had a very difficult time implementing them. They break most methods for incremental builds, and mean that a compiler is needed just to determine staleness. They also make fully parallelized compilation impossible, because dependencies can't be fully resolved by the build system.

People who care about build systems are a special kind of nerd. Programmers are often blissfully ignorant of what it takes to build large projects - their experience is based around building toy projects, which is so easy it doesn't really matter what you do.

In my experience, once a project has reached a certain size, you need to lay down simple rules that programmers can understand and follow, to help them from exploding the build times. Modules make that extra hard.