The makefile in that article is not really a makefile though. It is just a convenient way to bundle some shell commands. The real intention of a makefile is to

The makefile in that article is not really a makefile though. It is just a convenient way to bundle some shell commands. The real intention of a makefile is to specify dependencies, and how to (re)build targets if they are out of date compared to their dependencies. That is traditionally used to build e.g. C or C++ projects, and can indeed quickly become very cumbersome. Almost nobody writes them by hand for larger projects. These days almost everybody uses either some makefile generator or a more modern alternative to make.