I like to use make as it's available everywhere. I use Makefiles with podman to create images, containers, pods, start, stop them and display logs. With the alias 'm' for make I can execute complex actions with very few keystrokes. Also variables in Makefiles make it easy to updates labels, volumes, etc. But I would not use make for very complex projects.
Make is tremendously useful for running jobs with (static) dependencies. I used to run make for managing Docker instances until docker-compose became a thing.