As far as rants go, this one was a joy to read. Then I wept for the state of affairs in build tools. I'm not even close to familiar with so many as you've listed, but I never experienced one that didn't eventually turn into a Rube Goldberg contraption (if it didn't already start out that way).

> grown to a recursively gnarly Turing-complete mess

> gronk through many, many lines of make

Thank you for my new word of the day. It describes exactly how I feel sometimes, dealing with technical debt accumulated over years, Frankenstein's systems where parts are always churning - often for no good reason at all, new but worse in most aspects - it can be exhausting gronking through the layers of complexity.