I am curious of your notion of "gatekeeping", because you are the one being funny here.
People have been able to understand Make, use it and compile C for 20 damn years: Are people being more stupid today ? ( Spoiler: No)
If "today", with the unprecedent level of documentation you have on the Web, it is a problem for you to do so, then yes: you are indeed a bad developper.
I am a strong believer of "the show me the code" approach. It is easy to call all the actual tooling a "dumpfire", then show me a better one, or at least document in details what "a better" one would be.
Critics are easy and in this precise context, without arguments, they are just FUD or religious beliefs.
Repeatedly telling people that they're bad developers, should walk away from a computer, that they are "script kiddies", because they do not know or enjoy some arcane technical artifact. I call this gatekeeping.
Except that I do not think that you can call executing "make" and using your native package manager an "arcane", I am sorry.
These are basic actions that are documented even from tutorials from the 90's. They are basic actions that are generally part of any first year study in computer sciences.
That is not 'gatekeeping', there is no gate to keep here. I name more that fight laziness and understand your tooling.
Make is absolute, utter arcane bullshit. It is mad. It is complete nonsense.
Great. And you could be a developer for 40 years, if you do not precise why and how. This is your comment which is arcane bullshit and complete nonsense.
It’s nice that their is a stable convention, but it’s a shame that it’s so dated and is missing so many modern conveniences (mostly to do with dependency handling).
Manual dependency resolution is a tedious waste of time, no matter how well you understand what you are doing. It can and should be automated.
But keep calling people "script kiddies" that's cool.