I assume that they consider themselves world-tier geniuses that need to be renowned because open-source PS2 emulation was never as good as GameCube one, so even with all the problems their product is "the best". But instead they were always getting massive flak for such ridiculous and perpetually amateurish design decisions, like this one, and attempts to shift blame instead of fixing which made them ultra-bitter.

I worked around the problem for now by forcing files in proper place. So, it should be fine until next surprise. The last time I couldn't built the damn thing for more than a year. At least now it finally supports native 64-bit build.

Answering to another deleted comment: unfortunately, maintaining packages for all retroarch cores is very difficult due to their quantity and the fact that I personally use only few. Luckily, it has built-in updater of binaries from devs' repos. It's technically "unsecure", compared to distro repo's, but fairly decently maintained. I recommend only using retroarch with "thin" cores for old consoles and use stand-alone original emulators for "heavy" ones.