Makefiles are actually great! Just not as a build system.

If you have a project where you need to do a thing, you can instead make a Makefile to do the thing:

    thing:
        some shell command

that's it, now you get to type `make thing`.

The power is the generality: it can wrap any command, from jq to curl to whatever. It's perfect for small, weird workflows which don't naturally fit into other build systems.

But don't use it for C++!