I think that just supports my argument, really. I've never really used makefiles. The blog post talked about using patsubst to change a path. The name of the function essentially gives no clue at all what it does.

"the blog post talked"

Isn't that the problem with using blog posts as educational sources?

(I'm happy I was learning all my toolkit long before blogs became a thing. It's hard to open and read Physics book, when someone on YT talks funny about its second chapter.)