Fish command substitution for arguments -- eval safe?

In fish shell, I want to be able to expand a command substitution or variable as multiple arguments to another command, e.g.:

Without substitution

ls -l -h

Should give the same result as:

ls $(echo '-l -h')

Instead the second one gives an error:

ls: invalid option -- ''

If I instead do:

eval ls $(echo '-l -h')

It does what I want, it seems.

2 questions then:

1. Is using eval in this way actually going to do what I want consistently?
2. Is there some other way I should be doing this instead?

I read this question and answer, which is very similar to mine:Command substitution in fish

But the answer is not applicable in my situation.

The real world use case I have is following the instructions for gstreamer:https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/installing/on-linux.html?gi-language=c#

Where it says to build the tutorials with:

gcc basic-tutorial-1.c -o basic-tutorial-1 `pkg-config --cflags --libs gstreamer-1.0`

Which, of course, does not work in fish (because backticks). But when converted to $() syntax, it errors with:

gcc: error: unrecognized command-line option ‘-pthread -I/usr/include/gstreamer-1.0 -I/ ....

Because it has interpreted the output of the $() block as a single string -- which makes sense and seems sensible, except that it is blocking this very reasonable (imo) use case, and I'd like to be able to do this comfortably in fish.

Thanks!