Yes and potentially yes. Normally when manually writing Makefiles people assume the host system doesn't change as it's painful and the only alternative is to s

Yes and potentially yes. Normally when manually writing Makefiles people assume the host system doesn't change as it's painful and the only alternative is to sacrifice portability. If you want a more reliable/portable/stable build the only real option is use a build system like meson/cmake/autotools/basel/... to generate the appropriate Makefile for the current machine (and once you start doing that you might as well stop using make and use ninja instead).