What is the Fedora equivalent of the Debian build-essential package?

The closest equivalent would probably be to install the below packages:

sudo dnf install make automake gcc gcc-c++ kernel-devel

However, if you don't care about exact equivalence and are ok with pulling in a lot of packages you can install all the development tools and libraries with the below command.

sudo dnf groupinstall @development-tools @development-libraries

On Fedora 32+ you will need the following because @development-tools and @development-libraries won't work anymore:

sudo dnf groupinstall "Development Tools" "Development Libraries"

For Fedora 23 and above:

dnf install @development-tools

The command is yum-builddep. It is included in the yum-utils package.

sudo yum install yum-utils
sudo yum-builddep $the_pkg_you_want_to_build