I'll have to respectfully disagree. IMHO, the utility of DSLs like Make is high when used very sparingly, for simple flows like the one the linked article describes. The more complex your Makefile, the less you should be using Make. If you need to write complete programs in Make, just stop bending over backwards and pick a real programming language.
FWIW most non-trivial projects nowadays that use Make don't write makefiles directly but use make generators like CMake and Gyp.
FWIW most non-trivial projects nowadays that use Make don't write makefiles directly but use make generators like CMake and Gyp.