people who have to support windows do this sometimes because MS has gone for almost forty years now without ever specifying a default directory where libraries go. This is in spite of the fact that being the creator of the OS, the most-popular compiler, and the SDK should in theory give them enormous leverage to dictate where dependencies get saved.

There's this bizarre cultural difference you see between people who learned to program on windows compared to people who learned to program on unix wherein the Windows crowd don't see the value of having an easily reproducible build system because. Usually this results in some combination of needlessly-complicated scripts and checking binary builds of dependencies into version-control.

Requiring you to include a header-file while also defining a specific constant in only one place that turns the header file into a c-file is actually one of the more benign workarounds you see.

Not learning about how compilers, linkers and library managers actually work.

Even C++, and considering templates, if you want to use external templates optimization you need implementation files, and then there are modules (already working in clang/VC++).