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When your make targets are mostly PHONY targets, you may want to replace make with (bunch of) shell script(s).

Honestly, who came up with that `make run` nonsense? I see this quite often in the pythonverse.

Why use a bunch of shell scripts when you can use one file with a traffic cop built-in?

Traffic cop?

GP might be referring to "make -j 4" which allows controlled parallelism.

Yes, also parameter directs execution to the correct subscript if/when needed. No conditional boilerplate needs to be written, arcane enough in shell script as to need looking up every time.

Make is kinda weird too but the complexity appears later. The traffic direction is trivial.

What's wrong with using make this way? What would I win if I switched to shell scripts?

One thing you win is that the name of the script can give you a hint as to what it does.

You avoid all the complications of make. Extra syntax, variable substitution, lack of functions and loops, ...

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