I mostly do web development, and I went for quite a few years without having any more of a build tool than a shell script or two to minify files and the like.

I mostly do web development, and I went for quite a few years without having any more of a build tool than a shell script or two to minify files and the like. It's only been since I started using React that I went to a Gulp setup. And really, my experience with Gulp had been the opposite of the snide "hipster" dismissals. I wish I could find clean examples via googling that weren't useless due to APIs completely changing, or due to using a library that's been deprecated in favor of another library that's been deprecated...because, man, who still uses a library after a year? :P Somehow, though, I don't see make being a great replacement for my purposes. At the very least, it's not going to be any faster running Babel over a pile of files.