> And why does it matter that some editors don’t know about makefiles?

Because it isn't fun checking if the whitespace at the beginning of the line is a tab or spaces. And as said, you must know when to use tabs and/or spaces in rules.

For doing such a simple thing as calling some commands, Make has way too many subtle footguns which _will_ bite somebody, someday. The problem (that's not a problém at all, that's a reason to celebrate!) is that most JS devs and users aren't used to Make, compared to e.g. C programmers. To rephrase: as someone writing C, you have to use something like a Makefile, as anything else (like scripts) gets unreadable and -usable quite fast. But if you can get away with a less complex solution, you should really use that instead of Make.