If you’re really looking for a tool to collect small steps/script I highly recommend you check out the ‘just’ cli tool. It’s completely replaced our use of Make and the syntax is much easier.
I've always wanted to use one of those, but you have to convince the other developers on your team to use it as well.
Make is a relatively easy sell because it's on pretty much every system or at least trivial to install and has decades of reputation.
If it's hundreds, I'll agree with you, obviously that would be a huge effort to migrate.
But you made the argument that adding another build dependency is somehow difficult or undesirable which I can't see; the tool is installed in seconds on all major OS-es and package managers.
So let's not conflate those two separate things, yeah?
I've been using this on almost all of my projects, and am really pleased with it. Shell autocompletion is a nice bonus. If you also Nix, checkout `just-flake`:
I should specifically mention their docs. The docs are easily approachable with plenty of clear and concise examples. I even have a pdf copy of the doc book for quick reference.
Came here to say the same. Make works fine, until it evolves into a web of commands and associated shell scripts, and then most users give up on trying to understand what is happening. Justfiles are much more manageable.