Comment by rschloming

I think the reason make is both so controversial and also long-lived is that despite how everyone thinks of it, it isn't really a build tool. It actually doesn't know anything at all about how to build C, C++, or any other kind of code. (I know this is obvious to those of us that know make, but I often get the impression that a lot of people think of make as gradle or maven for C, which it really isn't.) It's really a workflow automation tool, and the UX for that is actually pretty close to what you would want. You can pretty trivially just copy tiresome sequences of shell commands that you started out typing manually into a Makefile and automate your workflow really easily without thinking too much. Of course that's what shell scripts are for too, but make has an understanding of file based dependencies that lets you much more naturally express the automated steps in a way that's a lot more efficient to run. A lot of more modern build tools mix up the workflow element with the build element (and in some cases with packaging and distribution as well), and so they are "better than make", but only for a specific language and a specific workflow.