Its seems more likely that they’re frustrated about the sheer amount to learn and they probably know make quite well.
But there are real advantages to these tools. There’s a lot of vanity libraries out there but not many vanity build tools.
What we want to do is slurp some text files up, apply some transformations to them, glob them together, run them through the minifier, and dump them into a final output. This is exactly what a decent makefile would fit well for. Instead, I got this, because apparently nobody wants to use anything that isn't the hot new way to do things, and so very few people have even had enough exposure to know that there are tested tools for these kinds of things that existed. The last time I was using make beyond trivial uses was a decade ago in college (incidentally, I actually did build jars with make, easier than fighting Eclipse...). But just knowing that something exists is more than half the battle, although the problem then is that it's frustrating as all hell watching the same ideas cycle round and round and round every couple years.
And yet, those tools fill a need that would be very hard to replicate with the toolchains that came before it. Good luck doing half of what gulp / webpack do from, say, a Makefile.
It's just that this argument keeps getting used for every single new "reinvented wheel" (to borrow from the GP). Sometimes the argument is as strong as "it couldn't be done any other way" and sometimes it's as weak as "this one is just incrementally better," but it feels a little like crying wolf.
Was it really "very hard" to make the old wheel do what you needed, or perhaps somehow extend it or add a library, or was it just far more fun and exciting to build something from scratch?
I generally don't mind a proliferation of tools, except when they start to break or conflict with each other, which is, I believe the GP's main concern, and at least tangentially related to the article.
I've had success in several JS projects using make in combination with the shell version of a lot of these plugins and npm scripts.
There is value in both approaches.