Yes, agreed. I went through SCons, Jam, CMake, and a few others. I’ve made projects fully with autotools and manually maintained IDE projects. Make compares well against most of these other tools, especially if you are using GNU Make.

However, I don’t use Make as much these days and tend to use one of two different replacements… either a Ninja build file generated by a Python script, or Bazel. Ninja solves the problems I have writing makefiles (rebuild when args change, rules with multiple outputs, create output directories) and gets out of the way. Bazel has a much higher level of complexity but for complex, multi-language projects I can’t see not using Bazel as a viable option these days.