I think you’re overstating the ease of use of make.
How does one discover dependencies in a cross platform way with Make without writing the logic themselves to stay up to date with platform changes? Or picking up configuration options from dependencies.
How does one make use of Ninja with make? Or discover changes to sdk paths for new platforms?
You end up having to duplicate that logic across every repo that needs it. Along the way you accrue lots of variance.
In the end you get something that is difficult to debug and scale. That’s why so many projects moved to cmake. It scales better. In much the same way that you can technically do anything you need with C, but other languages add ergonomics and scalability that people value more.
How does one discover dependencies in a cross platform way with Make without writing the logic themselves to stay up to date with platform changes? Or picking up configuration options from dependencies.
How does one make use of Ninja with make? Or discover changes to sdk paths for new platforms?
You end up having to duplicate that logic across every repo that needs it. Along the way you accrue lots of variance.
In the end you get something that is difficult to debug and scale. That’s why so many projects moved to cmake. It scales better. In much the same way that you can technically do anything you need with C, but other languages add ergonomics and scalability that people value more.