[ajross]

> The first is that make was developed for building C projects

This is sort of a misconception. The C compiler was developed for building C projects. Make exists because those projects had to build other stuff and needed a way to stitch the files together. Make's only built-in support for "C" amounts to some default rules for building .o files out of .c files.

If all you want from your build system is to compile a big unified blob of source in a single language into some kind of output file (like the examples you cite) you don't need make, just use whatever it is that your local language provides.

When you have requirements that go beyond that, where you have programs (often themselves built locally, and often in variant languages or runtimes) generating custom intermediates and need to track that madness, that's when you need a more complicated build manager than your compiler provides.

And that's when you start to understand why, despite four decades now of attempts to replace it, some of us still reach for make.