[saghm]

The tradeoff isn't just about documentation, but complexity. A tedious, manual build process is still tedious and manual if it's self-documenting, but a more streamlined build process without as much documentation might still be less of a burden overall. It's also not like Make doesn't have its own thorny edges too; one person's self-documenting use of a feature is another person's inscrutable magic invocation. If you're working on a team project and already require a certain level of expertise in the ecosystem you're using, it's arguable that using the native build system (warts and all) will be a better tradeoff.