There are many reasonable scenarios why you might want to do this: determining at the point of calling make which targets to force or deactivate for safety, projects with nested or external makefiles not directly under your control, reuse of MAKECMDGOALS throughout the makefile (including propagation to submakefiles), ...
.PHONY: $(MAKECMDGOALS)
qux:
foo: qux
bar: foo
It also very much depends on what the intent is, notably such a "autophony" make foo is very different from make -B foo.
The author just shared something they think is cool. That takes guts to show the world, and our critiques should respect that.
> giving Make a bad name
How so?
Fine. Write a `make.sh` that parses the arguments; that would be better.
> How so?
Well, read the comments here. Do you sense that Make is a beloved tool? Most of the complaints are about some details about syntax, and those complaints are completely valid. If you use Make for its intended purpose, then it's still easily well-worth using, despite that. But if you use it as a glorified script, then all you see is the warts, without any upsides. And you then tell all your friends that "Make sux!" Which is a huge shame because Make is awesome.
Sure, but `./build.sh dev` is a bit less obvious than `make dev`.
Another reason to use Make even if you don’t have any non-phony steps is that you can add those later if needed. (I agree that the author should mark {dev,build,deploy} as phony though.)