It makes sense to me to use a specialized build system for each language. They can be faster and richer than something generic. People can live inside one programming language for decades straight, so optimizing their experience is worth it.
Really? Seems pretty elegant to me.
The problem with Make (or any build tool) is that few developers care about how their project is built. They want to focus on writing their code, push a button, and get into testing it. That's a fair enough attitude.
But the problems with build tools are insidious. It's basically trivial to build a small project, so to start with, everyone assumes it's a nothing problem, and spend no effort on it. Then as the project grows, over months and years, the problems slowly accumulate. Each time some feature or corner case is added, the build gets slower, more complex, and cruftier. Eventually someone decides to take a look inside, and recoils in horror...
But it's not Make that's the problem (or any build tool). It's just the fact that building big projects is a tricky problem, and requires just as much effort to solve elegantly as any other tricky problem.
I worked at a big bank that had a problem with their Make-based build system taking multiple hours (sometimes days) to build some of their projects. They spent millions on trying to replace it with some Java monstrosity. I spent a few months rewriting their Makefiles, and the build times shrank to less than 1% of what they had been.
Make was the best tool for the job, because the job was vast, and had many, many corner cases. Make is a general purpose language, and is fairly unopinionated about how you use it to solve problems. All the "Make replacements" I looked at were far too opinionated to be elegantly bent to the task at hand. They were designed to look simple. That's great when your problem is simple, but big builds are not simple.