I thought to myself that I do this pretty frequently, but then I realized only if I'm going from make -j8 to make -j1. I guess parallelism does throw some indeterminancy into this
If parallelism adds indeterminacy, then you have a bug (probably in working out the dependency graph.) Not an unusual one - lots of open source in the 1990s had warnings about not building above -j1 because multi-core systems weren't that common and people weren't actually trying it themselves...
Whenever I traced them, those bugs were always in the logic of the makefile rather than in the compiler. A target in fact depends on another target (generally from much earlier in the file) but the makefile doesn't specify that.