[Galanwe]

> I know this could be considered blasphemous, but I constantly find myself using Make as a task runner

It's not, don't apologize, reusing battle tested tech is the way.

I have a quite close "template Makefile", though I prefer to store it as a cookiecutter (or more recently "copier") template for easier per-project bootstrap.

You could add a timestamped log function. I use that in mine so that targets have timestamped messages pre/post.

[mitjafelicijan]

This is a very good idea. I will add that. Thank you.