Which, coincidentally, is my main complaint with Make: It's way too easy to write shitty Makefiles. There are way too many wrong ways to do things. Arguably this is a community problem and not a tool problem, but it doesn't change the fact that most Makefiles are written badly.
I used Make professionally for 5 years and have since moved to other tech stacks that don't require Make but have tools that are far worse in every other way (cough Ant cough). But IMO the reason they win out is they are far less flexible, so there are fewer ways to do things, so they work better in aggregate.
Build tooling is something that most devs look at very rarely, so they never build expertise. Ergo, build tooling shouldn't require expertise.
If my theory holds out, I feel Gradle will become the new Make in a few years or a decade - very powerful but too many wrong ways to do things.