What kinds of things are you using phony targets for?

Everything I can. Building docs, checking health of prod, deploying to dev/prod (which has real+phony dependencies), starting the development web server with watchexec, running lint, tests, etc. Some of these might have real artifacts, but I typically have more phony than not.

Make has quite a few flaws, but it is near universal and a good location to centralize all required project work. Even if the entire task is defined in a shell script elsewhere. That being said, I have being looking longingly at just[0] which is not just concerned with compiling C, but has task automation builtin from the beginning.

[0] https://github.com/casey/just

Tests are done with `buck test`, linting and such can be done in bazel with aspects, not sure if buck can do the same, although I wouldn't recommend in most cases.

Deployment can be done with `run`, but again I wouldn't recommend it for deployment to real environments, starting a local devserver with run is a common pattern though.