An additional reason that drives me to use make on most new projects is the polyglot nature of many code repos. There are language/ecosystem-specific build tools: grunt, rake, etc. but often real world projects are a mix if different languages and to double down on just one language-specific tool feels unnecessarily constraining.

Having a build tool like make that is more closely aligned with the system level feels more natural for orchestrating build/test/deploy tasks that by their very nature contain more cross-cutting concerns.