Which makes ninja not that good enough a replacement, as make has the same problem: it’s so layered in arcane that in most cases you rely on tools to generate M

Which makes ninja not that good enough a replacement, as make has the same problem: it’s so layered in arcane that in most cases you rely on tools to generate Makefiles for you anyway. There are “alternatives” like some Python frameworks, but they are more “command runners” rather than graph resolvers, they lack inbuilt or simple ways to determine that a target is up to date, or they promise paralellism* (with fine print that maybe someday in a future version). One thing make is lacking (arcane stuff aside) is dynamic dependency graph, which could have made it viable for things like javascript transpiling and bundling. Even for C projects which are sorta kinda match made in heaven, you need a “makedepend” tool to traverse your sources.