Recursive make invocation isn't a required thing or a design point, it's not really even recommended. You see it commonly only in the "obvious" situation where

Recursive make invocation isn't a required thing or a design point, it's not really even recommended. You see it commonly only in the "obvious" situation where you're building a dependency that has its own build integration. And there, make works better than competing tools for precisely the reason that it inherits the jobserver environment and can thus make better use of the build hardware. I continue to believe that make is and remains the superior technology. Everyone else does like one or two things better (usually just limited to the developer-facing configuration language) and everything else worse.