Make provides awesome UX: in most cases you just type "make" and stuff just works, but there is a tradeoff: it's nearly impossible to write a crossplatform make file. Why you ask? Try copying a file (or directory) from one location to another, sure "cp", but it's -R is different on Linux and macOS! And then comes Windows - there is no good built-in alternative to "cp" as it's hard to make "xcopy" to ignore failures if target file/directory already exist (it tends to ask if you want to overwrite it or not), WSL might fix that in the future, but currently it's quite slow on IO side of things. So, sure given enough time and kung-fu we can write crossplatform make files ... but even if copying one silly file is such PITA .. it's hard to advocate for make in 2017. Probably the wisest solution is just using make to run something more comfortable, for C/C++ it can be cmake, premake, tup, etc. But then again: if I need to add something, like another build step, do I add it to the tool of choice or make? It's a very hard balance to sustain.

PS. Copying files specifically is such huge PITA that cmake implements crossplatform copy for you, just run "cmake -E copy $in $out" (can be added as add_custom_command in CMakeLists.txt)