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where, except for Windows, is requiring GNU Make a problem?

It's not really a problem on Windows, to be honest. MSYS2 gives you that, gcc, and a bunch of POSIX utilities to boot. It also gives you packages for libraries, and a Unix-like filesystem structure where they are deployed (/usr etc). Yet you end up building clean Win32 binaries, with no emulation layers.

I've heard BSD and mac both use much older, non-GPLv3 versions of make. Portability means supporting older versions too.

My first step on a non-GNU system back when I had to use those was to install the GNU utilities and add them to the beginning of my PATH. I suppose if I had to support them primarily I'd have gone the portability route, but fortunately I was always worrying about them secondarily instead.

/usr/bin/make on macOS is GNU Make 3.81, which is fairly ancient (2006) but still a much more featureful target than POSIX make.

Installing GNU make on BSDs is not difficult; for any project with a nonzero number of dependencies it's likely to be the most trivial one. If you're writing a C89-zero-non-posix-dependencies library then sure, you can't use GNU make, but you also probably only have a ten line makefile anyway.

That's the Ubuntu 14.04 version. Old, but make changes very little.

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