I like Make, and use it in personal JavaScript ecosystem projects that do actually need to build things with interdependency (eg https://github.com/justjake/quickjs-emscripten/blob/master/M...). I’ve also seen Makefiles grown to be horrendous monstrosities masquerading as command-line tools; for about a year at Airbnb we used a 1000+ line Makefile as the main tool for fiddling with Kubernetes cuz one of our senior engineers didn’t like Ruby, and I’ve seen another one get close to that level of cravenness.

What I learned from supporting Make and shell among a few different audiences is that most developers have no interest in how to write or maintain shell-like tooling. They forget or mess up quoting rules constantly, and eschew learning things and good design in these tools to a much greater degree than in their “normal” work in Java/Python/Ruby/Typescript/Golang.

For every POSIXly Correct HN Commenter (of which I count myself a member), there’s 100 regular software engineers who won’t read a `man` page on what $@ or $< mean in Make. I know that if I start writing a Makefile for $JOB, it’s gonna be me and that one guy who uses tcsh who are gonna maintain it and answer questions.

(Although for what it’s worth we don’t use package.json scripts either thank goodness. All our complicated build steps are typescript commands, and our glue is CI system YAML files.)