Make is fiddly, has gotchas and is far from perfect, from the development side - but it's certainly "good enough", and it's great once you've got your Makefile done. And it's available, or at least easily attainable, pretty much everywhere. I even use it on Windows.
Also, if you add a new target that would benefit from tracking dependencies between files, then make is already ready to do that.
I use makefiles for my Rust code with just default+test+install targets that do no dependency tracking (since Rust's build system already does that much better). But if I need to add a target for, say, validating some OpenAPI spec that only needs to run if the spec file updates, then that can go in the same Makefile.
Yeah, but if you follow the advice FTA, you now have to rely on a usable python version and make. Still fairly common, but what if I use node instead? I think the point is -- the more usability you add the more you potentially dilute how ubiquitous it is. I think it's okay to point to new tools in the space that shake things up and add usability for the purposes Make currently is used for. Ubiquity doesn't happen over night.
Even if I followed the advice in the article (I don't really plan to), python3 is very likely to already be there in a Linux distro for other reasons, whereas node.js is very likely to not be there.
If you're on another OS where neither make nor python3 nor node.js are there by default, then sure you're already going to manually install make, so the choice of python3 or node.js is basically identical.
Make is fiddly, has gotchas and is far from perfect, from the development side - but it's certainly "good enough", and it's great once you've got your Makefile done. And it's available, or at least easily attainable, pretty much everywhere. I even use it on Windows.