[eternityforest]

I wouldn't even say any of those make UNIX difficult to learn. 99% of people can be users and developers just fine without learning awk or sed or even make, if they don't do low level work.

It can all be incrementally replaced over time, without starting over, just like how systemd and pipewire didn't need to totally start over.

Make will probably need something more than just a library though, because it's gotta stay declarative. But the fact that make exists at all is kind of an issue. I think build and package management should be done in the language itself like non-C languages do.

The other use of make is almost as a pseudo UI, just a standard place to put a list of actions you can do.

Something like Ansible could replace that, in theory, or we could have some new "project control center" file with menus and inputs and settings.