Not to pile on -- and I'm sure there would be exceptions -- but I've worked with some large and dynamic (employee churn) dev teams and it's always been worth it

Not to pile on -- and I'm sure there would be exceptions -- but I've worked with some large and dynamic (employee churn) dev teams and it's always been worth it in my cases, so far, to burn a half day with new people to get them comfortable with Makefiles (and how to fix the common errors when editing them). Teams I've been on have used them for python, ruby, node, Java and Rust[1] codebases (across the years). It's definitely language-agnostic enough on its own. Oh! And the same Makefile is used in the CI/CD pipeline, to make the entire process more likely to be repeatable by our automation tools. [1] Yes, our Makefiles sometimes call docker/npm/ant/maven/gradle/cargo under the hood. Its been worth it, in my experience. One syntax on all projects to set up the workspace, refresh dependencies, deploy to dev env, clean, etc.