Personally I ended up sticking with gulp, but writing a small helper that turns the tasks into command line commands (search up gulp-run-command and my username

Personally I ended up sticking with gulp, but writing a small helper that turns the tasks into command line commands (search up gulp-run-command and my username if you care to look, I really only published it for ease of use though so don't rely on it not changing), so it basically feels like an easier cross-platform make with a fancier dependency system. 99% of tools have a CLI and it's generally pretty damn good. If you don't have many "tasks" or they are pretty simple, just use npm's built in "npm run scripts" which works fantastically for smaller projects IMO. I agree though about the lack of ability to pass flags. I wanted something that lets me make command line commands as tasks, build a dependency tree ala gulp, and pass in optional flags to trip things like prod vs dev builds. But at the end of the day getting make to cooperate on all platforms was a mess, and it sure as shit didn't scale well or do stuff in parallel at all. So a simple if somewhat inelegant gulp file seems the best bet for us. (I imagine this is how new build systems are born!)