That's a double-edged sword: because make doesn't "support" your language things get hairy (think sed) as soon as you need to support anything non-trivial (say header dependency extraction for C/C++). Doing it in a portable way is often just impossible (try to do header dependency extraction for MSVC on Windows with make).

So ideally you want both ad hoc rules (like make) as well as some king of build system plugin support which allows you to write more complex rules in something more powerful and portable. This is the approach we have taken with build2[1].

[1] https://build2.org