> All of this hassle would be pointless unless you consider one important platform: Windows, where you don't natively have Make anyway. [...] You may still argue that this project still requires GCC and thus there should be Make even in Windows.

I think that is a very good argument though: Windows doesn't have MSVC or any other compiler out of the box either, it is up to you to install the requirements so having Make as a requirement - especially considering how standard it is - is perfectly fine. Using something like MSYS2 gives you a Linux-like shell with all the tools you'd expect there.

There is no real reason to require Node aside from the author wanted to play around with it, the functionality that tool provides can be provided by other existing tools (Autotools, premake, CMake, meson/muon, etc) or even GNU Make itself (using its extensions that wont be compatible with other "makes" though).

(also while Autotools can feel a bit arcane, they have one feature that other similar tools do not have: you do not need to have Autotools installed to build the project, only some shell and some make, both being very standard in pretty much any unix-like OS and for Windows, well, see the first paragraph :-P)