An important point of the article was to use standard tools installed everywhere and not some obscure niche tools. Please note that you yourself felt the need to explain what “Procfil” is in the first place.
I wouldn't consider the industry backing of Heroku and a collective 4,500+ GitHub stars between the tools particularly niche or obscure. Crank it up to ~20k stars if you want to count deploy tools that can use them, like Dokku or Flynn. Anyway, the other great thing about Procfile is that it's just a declarative format. Lots of tools can leverage them, and they are an important part of my and many others' workflows.
I also don't think the article is too keen on "standards", judging by it referring to make a "task launcher" and the suggested usage completely diverging from the expected behavior of the program.
Is it even packaged for Debian/Ubuntu yet? Make has been there for decades and is available on practically every developer machine out there. Compared to Make, nearly every tool is niche and obscure.
I also don't think the article is too keen on "standards", judging by it referring to make a "task launcher" and the suggested usage completely diverging from the expected behavior of the program.