I've been moving most of my projects over to Makefiles, instead of npm scripts [1]. Unless I am missing something obvious, it's nicer to run:

make vs. npm start make thing vs. npm run thing

But also more importantly, the Makefile itself feels much cleaner, rather than stuffing scripts in package.json files. The thing I'm confused about, why do npm scripts seem to dominate? I don't see many people using Makefiles.

[1] https://github.com/umaar/video-everyday/blob/master/Makefile