generally the tools that are optimized to make the common case easy aren't so useful to me because i often have alot of intermediate build artifacts/stages.
and i really like the declarative nature of make..just not all the fragility and warts.
does anyone have any suggestions for a nice general declarative alternative?
I don't know your use case in depth, but I don't see why Task wouldn't work for you, since it's similar to Make in this regard.
You can have multiple tasks (for each step) and then either set dependencies or have a task that call all other tasks in the right sequence. And, of course, you'd have to enable [this](https://taskfile.org/#/usage?id=prevent-unnecessary-work).
Anyway, seems that Make is already enough for you, since you're used to it's quirks.