I doubt the analogy is apt. Make is not an amazing (abit slightly bloated) meta tool that solves all your problems on all platforms (abit slowly). Make is van

I doubt the analogy is apt. Make is not an amazing (abit slightly bloated) meta tool that solves all your problems on all platforms (abit slowly). Make is vanilla javascript, along with all the bumps and hassles of not working correctly on multiple platforms, having odd obscure syntactic oddities and only kind of supporting various operations in newer versions (which may or may not be available on various platforms). The newer build tools are trying to do exactly what jquery does, and abstracting away those rough edges for a consistent build behavior with better syntax. Going back to make is the 'use "vanilla JS" for everything' step in your list above, not the final step.