That kind of anaemic Makefile in the article can be expressed as a single case statement in a plain POSIX shell script:

    #!/bin/sh
    set -e

    case "$1" in
        up)
            docker-compose up -d
            ;;

        build)
            docker-compose rm -vsf
            docker-compose down -v --remove-orphans
            docker-compose build
            docker-compose up -d
            ;;
        *)
            echo "unknown verb: $1"
            ;;
    esac

I honestly think there's a phenomenon where, since the bash man page is too bloated, looking up shell syntax has become a no-no. So if people don't already know the syntax for what they want to do, they treat shell scripting as a lost cause.