[kimikimi]

FWIW there's a scope threshold that many projects don't always have to cross that justifies using a "real" build tool - and it has to do with those "hairy" parts of file detection and automatically finding dependencies in the shared environment.

If the project allows it, though, your dependencies can be shrunk down until there's no issue. This is far more the case with target languages that already understand modules (e.g. Rust or Python versus C or JS), or "one big framework" projects where you are relying on linking in the one framework and having it do all the heavy lifting on the build side of things.

Actually customizing a build substantially beyond that, tends to be the case more often when you have something like a compiler within your own pipeline, like automatically transforming and clipping source art assets into optimized, UI-ready form. With those systems there is a lot to be said for a simple script that you can debug.