I see GNU Make as sitting on the opposite end of a spectrum than Git. Git is fascinating as a sophisticated, featureful system emerging from a simple fundamental concept (Merkle tree of file hashes), whereas Make is a mish-mash of concepts cobbled together to expose a particular set of user features (describe and execute a graph of executions in a factorized way).

Git emerged decades after other version control systems were first invented, and found a neat abstraction that covered the space.

That's why I have such hope for the BSalC paper and what can emerge from it.