Comment by RHSeeger

I use makefiles all the time for my projects; projects that are actually built with something else (ex, gradle, maven, whatever). My makefiles have targets for build, clean, dependencies, and a variety of other things. And they also have inputs (like "NOTEST=true") for altering how they run. And then I use make to actually build the project; so I don't need to remember how the specific build tool for _this_ project (or the one of many build tools in a project) happens to work. It works pretty well.