For simple things, yes npm run is a better option.
But with more and more Tasks i prefer cleaner and better readable solution.
Depending on the kind of project and tasks i use grunt / gulp or webpack.
I've not found anything that can't be accomplished with npm run.
I mostly use browserify, the commands for which can easily be run from a single line.
For more complicated things all I have to do is create a js file and add it to the scripts object. It is really much simpler than grunt/gulp make it out to be.
AND I don't have to rely on plugins being available I can use any node module.
I like the idea of npm run for scripts. I just added something to automatically run tests for specific products at work.
A very simple thing that Make does is when you run `make` it will only run the recipe if something has changed. Using npm scripts eliminates this (as I'm guessing gulp does as well).
Same. It's really easy to do everything I need just using plain old CLI.