You lose incremental builds of modern bundlers/transpilers, which makes your build time too slow for bigger projects. People nowadays expect to see changes almost in realtime using hot module replacement etc.

That's because those tools aren't designed to play well with others. It's not due to the design of make.

I would say it's partly because of the design of make.

A Makefile consists of separate commands¹ and is heavily file-based¹, which makes it rather slow and doesn't allow to keep state (in memory) between re-runs. Traditionally this hasn't been bottleneck, because compiling C code was relatively slow operation, but modern web development tools prefer to work with in-memory streams instead of invoking executables for tiny files on disk.

I'm not saying you cannot do things with make, but in NodeJS/web ecosystem it just doesn't feel as natural/flexible as the "native" NodeJS-based toolchain.

[1] Great for interoperability, but sometimes more tailored solution is worth it.

Launching a process on Linux only takes about 2ms, and make only needs to do it for parts that change. There is no reason you couldn't use a make-based system to get incremental rebuilds with under 100ms latency, which is about as good as most people get with native JS systems.

For js code you often want hot module reloading which is probably very hard to get with make.

That sounds like a great idea. Does anything like that exist already?

Easy enough (assuming $SRC is your list of source files and 'all' is top level target) 'make watch' could do this

   watch:
        while ! inotifywait -e modify $(SRC) ; do time -p make all; done

If you care for it, fswatch is cross-platform:

https://github.com/emcrisostomo/fswatch

something along the lines of inotify:

http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/inotifywait.1.html

or just use tup

http://gittup.org/tup/

Also, entr

http://entrproject.org

There's "when-changed" in pip.

    pip install when-changed
    when-changed *.tex -c "make all && echo 'done'"

Then you can make rule in your make file called "watch" or "build-server" which calls that command, so you just need to write "make watch".

It's trivial to roll your own: https://github.com/gall0ws/watch