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> In extreme cases a no-op build with make can easily get to 15+ seconds.

Most developers will never see such a system. Optimizing for that kind of scale at an early stage has all the problems of any other premature optimization. It's most important to just get the build system out of the way so you can get your real work done, and you do that by writing makefiles, since makefiles are universally understood.

Now, when a project does grow to the proportions you mention, you can start looking at alternatives --- but I'd argue that these alternatives should amount to more efficient ways to load and evaluate existing makefile rules, not entirely different build paradigms. Make's simplicity is too important to give up.