I find a bunch of the decisions in Make to not be great - but it's all just syntax stuff. At its core all a Makefile is is a dependency graph, which is necessa

I find a bunch of the decisions in Make to not be great - but it's all just syntax stuff. At its core all a Makefile is is a dependency graph, which is necessary in all the more advanced config managers, only those others are much more heavyweight than the vast majority of projects ever need. Most code doesn't need to vary arguments or parameters based on the target environment, and so that complexity is unneeded, in which case a Makefile can do it all.