Makefiles are great entry points for ci/cd pipelines. It's easy to pass arbitrary environment variables at runtime, targets to build, define basic dependencies,

Makefiles are great entry points for ci/cd pipelines. It's easy to pass arbitrary environment variables at runtime, targets to build, define basic dependencies, and have clear steps to execute that can include some minimal inline shell. And since it's pretty dependency-less, I can run the same make commands locally to test the pipeline as I'd use in a remote CI system. I often use them as a wrapper for Terraform weirdness, where you may want to call an ADFS-enabled AWS login tool or not, depending on if `aws sts get-caller-identity` returns. Or assume a role before running all targets. Or extract values from a terraform.tfvars.json, to pass to the above two steps. Or bootstrap a remote backend if it doesn't exist. Or remove stale module symlinks. Or properly run init, get, and validate before running a plan or apply. Or document weird -target usage. The end result of just running make prep and make apply with no further knowledge required is exactly the experience I wanted out of Terraform initially.