/usr/bin/make on macOS is GNU Make 3.81, which is fairly ancient (2006) but still a much more featureful target than POSIX make. Installing GNU make on BSDs is

/usr/bin/make on macOS is GNU Make 3.81, which is fairly ancient (2006) but still a much more featureful target than POSIX make. Installing GNU make on BSDs is not difficult; for any project with a nonzero number of dependencies it's likely to be the most trivial one. If you're writing a C89-zero-non-posix-dependencies library then sure, you can't use GNU make, but you also probably only have a ten line makefile anyway.