Make is solving many complicated tasks, like keeping in mind when to re-run some target (there is communication going on with the compilers that provide make .d

Make is solving many complicated tasks, like keeping in mind when to re-run some target (there is communication going on with the compilers that provide make .d files so that they know which source files influence a binary), or running job servers managing parallelism that also support nested sub-makes. But it also has many ugly warts. It's hard to design something that solves both those tasks as well as make does, and also as generalist as make does. Often they are solving a subset, what currently itches the main developer. But something that is both as general, and as comprehensive as make, those tools are rare. Ninja for example checks many of the boxes, but lacks make jobserver support.