Making sure a dependency is up to date before doing something is annoying. Building a representation of dependencies to figure out what can be done in parallel is a bit more complex. Doing it for dozens of targets is a major pain in the backside.

Sure, you can do it in bash, or python, or whatever. But then you have a cumbersome, not particularly interesting piece of code full of boiler plate. Of course, you can design it a bit, organise things neatly, and then use a config file because fiddling with the code in each project is unsustainable in the long run. At this point, you’ve just made a poor copy of make and thrown away all the good bits that result from decades of experience and weird corner cases.

The syntax of Makefiles is terrible, but make itself is very useful and versatile.

And that pattern is not abuse, it’s the sort of things Make was designed for. It’s just that we’re used to think of make as this old thing that just runs a compiler and that’s such a pain to deal with that we need Makefile generators to do it properly. And certainly that’s true for complex software compilation, but make is more versatile than that.