I love this example, but more because it shows just how obtuse make is even for simple programs. There's one self-explanatory line in this whole program (`SRCS = foo.cpp bar.cpp baz.cpp`), and everything else is magic you'd just have to cargo-cult forward.
I _think_ that it's also broken, if I copy-paste it: your comment renders with spaces in the `clean :` stanza, but I believe make requires that to be a tab character?
While certainly simplistic, the bazel example shows one obscure feature (glob) that's both still fairly obvious, and unnecessary for a direct comparison to your example. The rest reads clean, and could be replicated/modified by someone with no clue fairly straightforwardly.
Don't get me wrong, bazel BUILD files will often hide a whole lot of magic. But the benefit is, for a newcomer the files they have to interact with on a day-to-day basis are friendly. Take tensorflow, one of the most complicated bazel repos I know - browse to a random leaf BUILD file and you'll probably find it quite readable. (I randomly clicked to https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorf... , seems pretty clear - especially when I consider it's compiling kernels for GPUs, which I know nothing about.)
(Disclaimer: Googler, work closely with the bazel team. I like bazel.)