30 years on and I've used
make, imake, autotools, cmake, ant, gradle, boost.jam (because every C++ library really should have its own individual custom build tool-chain), scons, ninja, and maybe the least bad was a very nice system internal to ILM (though it was purpose written for building C++ & python targets). These days I'm using bazel the most, and while it can be forced into working, it's pretty miserable (and requires support of about 5 people on a dedicated build team). It does not bring software developers joy.
A group/language/team decides "that's it, I hate build tool X, we're going to solve this problem", and they go build their thing, but they care about different details and make some things easy, handle some things automatically, and leave other things as "just don't care" with the resulting tool ends being just like all the previous ones.
I'd be willing to wager lots of money that in future years there will be many more build systems, and they too will perfectly match their predecessors.