Nobody would use make instead of maven [1] with Java for example. Ruby uses Rakefile instead of Makefiles. You will probably confuse lots of developers that work on your project if you do that.
On top of that Makefiles are known to be generated these days ( CMake ).
1 : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2209827/why-is-no-one-us...
Even the ergonomics of the tool are poor - it spams log output with all sorts of information other than what you actually need (like the output of a failed compilation). Getting information from a failed test is painful. If you change one module that another depends on, the latter will not be rebuilt - letting you find issues via NoSuchMethodError at runtime. Annotation processors require special care to enable, and don't always run when they should.
I would rather use make and javac than Maven. Gradle, Bazel (and its diaspora of non-google imitations) would be much better choices.
The idea that "nobody" uses make for Java when Java itself does, is a little bit a stretch ;)
Apparently, most people......