Software with small scopes can be finished. It doesn’t sound too complicated to just push a new bug fix each year, by anyone. If anything, make is probably a significantly more complex codebase due to all the hacks it accumulated over the years, as a result of a dumb model it started with.
https://just.systems/man/en/introduction.html
Just has quite a few features and it's at version 1.35.
I don't have any of those concerns with GNU Make.