sure, let's stop looking for better ways to do things because this one 30-year old way is capable of being twisted into what you need, no matter what it is.

I get the reverence around make but don't blind yourself to potentially better ways of doing things.

I would even go so far as to say that intentionally avoiding new ways to approach these things will necessarily blind you to better ways once they do come along, and I wonder how many good tools have died because "[x] does all I need." (replace "x" with whatever you like.)

Is there really any propriety around this tool when something as abysmal as autotools has to exist to generate the makefiles/etc.?

This simple-ish guide made me realise that make is not as suited to my needs as a mostly web developer, and that just would work better. NPM functions are doing just fine for me now, and some of the routines I'd map to npm commands anyway I don't know how much benefit it would actually bring to me.