My real issue is the constant wheel-making impulse, that leaves us with a shattered landscape of people tripping and falling over busted-ass and abandoned wheels. I have a JavaScript front-end project that uses three different package managers, and four different make-analog tools, plus some batch files sprinkled on top to orchestrate the common use cases of this monstrosity. Nothing that we are doing here is that complicated, except for this sea of shitty half-baked ecosystems around these tools, each of which was considered best-of-breed at one point.

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.