> make solves problems you get early in a project ("let's get this handful of files automatically built") and doesn't even try to address issues of modern software development, like build parallelism and dependency management. Its facilities for debugging problems are laughable.

Go look up plan9's mk. It's a remake of the program written by the designers a few decades later with everything they learned from it. Not only are the variables idiomatic, and the spaces problem fixed, but you can ask for output at each stage and (IIRC) view the graph that it builds.