Sure.
...but to be fair, regardless of the make syntax, you've also got to look at the history of make, and what it's designed to achieve.
Make is for executing shell commands on file patterns with dependency rules.
It's not designed to use an ecosystem of plugins or have long running processes (eg. to run a local server or watch for file changes). It's not designed to be a scripting language (although it can be, since it's technically turing complete).
Now, when you look at other things which have come along to replace make as a build tool: cmake, grunt, gulp, ant, rake, maven, scons, premake, etc.
I think it's probably a little bit superscillious to suggest that all the people building these tools were just too retarded to realize how good make was.
More likely, they had specific needs that make didn't address.
Rust, for example, just recently had a reasonable make based solution, but they decided to depreciate it in favour of cargo, because it was simply too difficult to support in an appropriate cross platform manner.
Make isn't a bad tool; for very doing some specific things. Specifically building c code on unix-ish systems.
Is it the right tool for fetching the dependencies of and invoking a large set of ruby/javascript/python scripts and plugins to build the assets for a website, running a local development server and watching file changes and pushing livereload changes to the browser as the files change?
No. Make is absolutely rubbish at doing those things.
...not because make is rubbish, but because it's not for doing those sorts of things.