I agree, yet I also see no good universal alternative. Every language has a nice tool to do things in it's ecosystem, but the moment you need to coordinate two languages or go beyond simple stuff, make is the only good option.
Yep. And honestly most language specific versions of make still have glaring missing features. Which doesn't matter, until when it really matters.
I want to embrace a make replacement, but if the pattern holds, they will be prying make out of my cold dead hands to make me presentable for my funeral.
I agree that make is confusing at first but I don't think it should fall out of use. It's a great tool that I use everyday it is far simpler than its competitors once you get used to it. It is basically glorified bash scripting.
Meanwhile, Windows has become drastically better for development over the past few years. There are still some drawbacks, but a ton of the anti windows circlejerking in tech spaces is caused by people who haven't touched windows as a dev environment in 10+ years.