It's not a waste if you can leverage what your teams existing knowledge instead of learning the quirks and tricks of make.
It's not a waste if you can use your existing tooling (editor plugins, debuggers, unit test frameworks...) to process your build files.
I don't see how your argument holds ground. If everyone used make, tooling would support it, and you wouldn't need to learn the "quirks and tricks" of a dozen other systems.
The problem with make is that it's not portable, since it needs to call system specific binaries, like rm(1) vs del. There's also the BSD vs GNU divide.
Other than that, a newfangled tool like gulp doesn't even have a clean one liner for copying one file to a different location with a different name. It's absurd.
??
gulp.src("srcfile")
.pipe(rename("destfile"))
.pipe(gulp.dest("destloc"));
Compare to: cp srcfile destloc/destfile
Edit: In addition, the above gulp command reports success even if the file doesn't exist. If you want to check that, you need to import another library and expand the command with another pipe.