If you stick with what is in common between ninja build and Makefiles, and comment any usage you do of what isn't, the file will mostly mention a series of inputs -> box -> outputs. What happens is make will dispatch in a way that the inputs are all satisfied. It works fine afaict, the only issue is make doesn't contain by itself the tools that it expects to be available in your environment, so you will still need something else to solve that.

It's quirky, but you can sort of fake dependencies on tools in make too.