Not the original parent, but the problem I've noticed most recently with make is when people use it to orchestrate building/running docker containers. I've seen

Not the original parent, but the problem I've noticed most recently with make is when people use it to orchestrate building/running docker containers. I've seen several cases where containers will be pulled/rebuilt on every invocation (even if they don't need to be) because there's no file based dependency to indicate they're actually up to date. While docker's layer caching helps with this, it still can add a fair bit of time in some cases. I've worked around that in the past by creating empty "target files" that are created when a given target is built and which dependencies rely on, but it's not a perfect solution. I've looked around for a make alternative, but although I like rake, I don't really use Ruby these days, and so dealing with RVM/rbenv and whatnot is sort of a pain and not worth the effort over make.