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>Pure make (you only see Makefile) This is suspicious.

Wut?

Most non-trivial software can't be built cross-platform with pure Make and no configuration step. If software only comes with a Makefile, it's usually a good sign that it only builds in a single "blessed" development environment (and as a heavy Mac user, I can tell you that the blessed environment is never Mac).

My software has only Makefile, but it works on both Ubuntu 20.04 and Debian 11. The Makefile calls meson & ninja & npm.

I tell macOS users to install VirtualBox and then build my software inside.

Which is annoying as virtualbox does not run on Modern mac hardware.

It is not nice on older as you can relatively easily make things work on most Unix systems if you don't use Linux specific calls.

> The Makefile calls meson & ninja & npm

Makefile-that-calls-3-other-build-systems isn't really using Make to build, is it? You are using Make as a glorified batch file. Could just as well use bash.

> I tell macOS users to install VirtualBox and then build my software inside.

This is pretty much the textbook definition of "non-portable build"

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