Thank you for making me feel a little bit vindicated. This is precisely how I build my current side project, I essentially mask all of the build/runtime option

Thank you for making me feel a little bit vindicated. This is precisely how I build my current side project, I essentially mask all of the build/runtime options/tweaking behind a shell script and call all of it through that. ('./run remake', for example, or './run with valgrind' if you're in a debugging mood) For me, the makefile itself wasn't the problem, I've been rather aggressive to keep it as pretty much just a dependency enumeration with flag lists and (arrogantly) it is rather clean, but the runtime flags/things I need to wrap the executable around pushed me to the script. (I honestly worried that this was sloppy since it indicated exactly what it did, mask really ugly complexity behind a shiny frontend, which always makes me wonder if that complexity wasn't undue, but it does give the advantage that your last paragraph mentions, that it gives a more modular pseudocode of the various components of building/running.)