I've hacked on audited objects before to accomplish something similar (https://github.com/boyski/audited-objects) It uses ld preload to do it and not strace, but same idea. I was checking existing makefile rules, but was considering using audited objects to help transition to tup or bazil.

IIRC strace wouldn't work if you used any setuid binaries (horrible but our makefiles used sudo for some things).

There are also some tricky corner cases like sed -i which creates a new file then moves it.