I'll add that, on behalf of distro maintainers everywhere, we don't really mind running autoreconf or whatever against a raw tarball fetched from a git tag, as it were, and dealing with these codegen/release prep bits ourselves as a part of the package building process.
Perhaps we should be fetching git tarballs and doing this work ourselves unilaterally rather than relying on upstream-prepared release tarballs anyway? The target audience for those is the casual/ad-hoc builds anyway.