I rather just write a bash script. It's the lowest common denominator. Make may not be installed by default in many places and it has some weird syntax quirks that make it annoying to use IMO.

Here's an example of how I like to do my "bash scripts that sorta work like make": https://github.com/francislavoie/laravel-websockets-example/... basically each function is a "command", so I do like "./utils start" or whatever.