I used make for a long time on my JS codebases, and I agree that it is very useful. You can do a lot without needing to write a lot, and file targets usually 'make sense' for most build tasks.

I decided to switch to Grunt, though, to enable Windows developers to build my projects. This decision stems from the fact that Node does not run in Cygwin in Windows, so we weren't getting Windows build support 'for free'. The Grunt build files are much much more verbose, but I know that they work cross-platform as I no longer rely on CLI tools that may not be present, or may have different flags between the BSD and GNU variants.

If you don't care about Windows developer support, though, make is definitely worth investigating.