Why not just use shell scripts instead of trying to work around make’s weirdness to make it do something it wasn’t designed for?
If make is available, odds are that a bash-compatible shell is too.
If make is available, odds are that a bash-compatible shell is too.
Make's weirdness exists for a useful purpose. Using Bash to avoid learning Make's useful features not only abandons useful functionality, but then runs into the weirdness of Bash (which also exists for a useful purpose).
Kids today are so impatient they never take the time to skill themselves up, and end up wasting more time in the long run. The most efficient use of anybody's time is to learn valuable skills once that save them time and frustration later. Read the manuals for tools like Make, learn how to use them, and you will reap the rewards for your entire career. Avoid learning Make and you will have a long career being frustrated by how everything is hard, complicated and time-consuming.
Make is designed to take a bunch of little shell scripts, give each one an arbitrary name (which can be the output files if you want, but doesn't have to be), and run them. Dependencies are run first, if your script has any of them. Files can satisfy dependencies unless you tell Make that they don't.
It's really not different from a shell script with a bunch of functions that you can call by name, except that Make has already provided the scaffolding for you (including dependency-awareness, tree walking, parallel execution, etc)
This is what I use when I want the "common entry points" to a project, but don't need all the "make weirdness". It makes it very easy to essentially create a project-specific CLI, and has a bunch of features to make THAT use case much easier.