Make is still popular (not necessarily loved), because it still largely adheres to the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and one thing only. Anything more com

Make is still popular (not necessarily loved), because it still largely adheres to the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and one thing only. Anything more complex, make it executable and put it on the path and then call it from make. Gradle. It's a full programming language. And let's not forget there's a ray tracer in pure cmake doing the rounds. Being cross-platform without having to drop out of the main build tool isn't necessarily a benefit, and that's part of the reason for it's complexity.