Just as an anecdote, in all my time as a professional software developer, the number of projects I have worked on that have enjoyed reliable, reproducible, incr

Just as an anecdote, in all my time as a professional software developer, the number of projects I have worked on that have enjoyed reliable, reproducible, incremental builds is zero. The effects of global optimisations change. The output code winds up varying based on the order of incremental changes. Updated dependencies get overlooked because of race conditions or networking glitches or filesystem bugs or a hundred other unlikely but not impossible failures. Incremental builds are great for quick day-to-day development, but in my experience they are invariably unsuitable for robust production builds. For me, those should use a git clone or equivalent into an empty directory and then a completely clean build of everything, always.