The fact that everyone goes out of their way to reinvent this really goes to show how awful the Make experience is.

I have a pretty awesome experience with make. If you use it for what it's designed for i.e. building files from a graph of dependencies, it's pretty handy. I use for auto-generated code, binary code as well as tasks that depend on other tasks, such as logging into system A requires getting this key from AWS etc. Most people have bash shortcuts for simple scripts to automate things, I instead write Makefiles, since it seems closer to my mental model, you want to do X but doing X depends on resources Y Z T, make figures out the rest.

Unless you're working on something complex, Make is pretty great. My only complaint as a regular use is the lack of support for spaces in target names.