I also use make this way and have done for years. I even have the same kind of religious ritual the author has, like writing the Makefile is part of setting up the codebase and organising in my own head how the whole local dev environment is going to work.

The only thing is, this isn't what make is actually for. A number of commenters have recommended Just - the one I've been using on my personal projects is Task - https://taskfile.dev/ - which is pretty great. As other commenters have said, the problem is that make is installed everywhere already. I would love to see a task runner become standard to the same extent, and will have a look at Just if that's the one people are using.