Good news: I was able to compile the development version of ETK on a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 (released Apr 2018), using the instructions on https://docs.einsteintoolkit.org/et-docs/Simplified_Tutorial_for_New_Users (one exception: I used the Ubuntu OpenMPI MPI stack).

Note that the Intel compiler does not yet support Ubuntu 18.04, so I found it a pleasant surprise that ETK compiled out of the box using GCC. Hooray!