Can you be more specific what you view as hacks or idiocies? Besides the criticism of .PHONY targets, which I don't think is a hack nor particularly ugly. When I mean shell I'm referring to a family of shell languages that are used run commands, change directories, etc. Fish is a shell, for example. Babashka can be considered to be a shell. It doesn't even need to be those, someone using make could use python or javascript for the scripting part if it works better than a shell language.