We have 47 half-built over-complicated build systems, because writing build systems is hard.

Writing correct Makefiles is also really hard, and good luck debugging them. Make is simple and beautiful for small, self-contained projects without many dependencies, but it does not scale well (and even then it's tricky, see [0][1]).

Having 47 different build tools with their own flaws is certainly bad, but they exist because of Make's shortcomings. Just saying "make is fine, use it" won't fix anything.

[0] https://cr.yp.to/redo/honest-script.html

[1] https://cr.yp.to/redo/honest-nonfile.html