Comment by magic_smoke_ee

An engineer should learn first principles and master the tool rather than dancing around it or reach immediately for replacing it with something else. This is why the "replacement" tool "just" is fundamentally terrible because it doesn't do dependency checking and optimizes for the wrong things. Instant loss of efficiency throwing away the power and simplicity of makefiles (GNU extensions often needed).

Instead, (GNU or vanilla) makefiles are ideals for very simple, portable projects. Make is everywhere.

For anything complicated, a proper build system that doesn't use autotools like cmake or bazel.