The point of make is to avoid doing what does not need to be done. Don't recompile binary whose sources didn't change, don't copy file which is already there, a

The point of make is to avoid doing what does not need to be done. Don't recompile binary whose sources didn't change, don't copy file which is already there, and so on. Because those operations add up to hours as the project grows. If we didn't mind waiting for hours each time we build, then of course, a shell script that does `rm -rf target` then assembles everything from scratch would be significantly more straightforward and readable.