I wish there was something as standard, ubiquitous, fast&light, dependency-less, and adopted by the whole Unix ecosystem and beyond like make is now, yet better

I wish there was something as standard, ubiquitous, fast&light, dependency-less, and adopted by the whole Unix ecosystem and beyond like make is now, yet better (= less archaic, more "write once works everywhere", uniform single way of depending on other projects, focused on the actual code/bins/libs and their dependencies instead of specific packaging for specific distros, ...). Not some "hype of the day" build system of course as that by definition makes it a short lived maintenance burden rather than universal. While make is universal, with makefiles now it's so bad, that even if you write pure C90 code with zero dependencies (which should work everywhere), users will still find reasons why you should add all kinds of platform dependent stuff or things for a particular distro to your makefile...