I pretty much went down the same path, though with all of Make's quirks, my generic Makefiles end up being nothing more than an index of commands that instead r

I pretty much went down the same path, though with all of Make's quirks, my generic Makefiles end up being nothing more than an index of commands that instead run bash scripts. But then the problem is shifted into bash's error prone syntax. So then for non-trivial logic, I end up having the bash script call a Python script, especially if dependencies are involved. It would be nice to have something like EditorConfig for project commands, i.e., my Sublime or your VS Code could parse one common Makefile (or similar) and map its commands to Build, Run, Debug, etc in the UI. In some sense, I think a different real solution is to Dockerize everything and then just docker build / docker run. Of course this can get complex for some projects, especially where the local setup is different than the production setup, e.g., Docker Compose vs Kubernetes for instance.