I'll look at Just, but is there anything else actually in make's space (scripting language agnostic, target language agnostic, auto parallelized, declarative, ergonomic syntax that is not xml, json, etc).
Many things claim to be a make replacement, but don't meet those basic requirements.
eg: I wouldn't want to maintain a large Java project with make. Gradle has a lot of helpful built-ins for managing the complexity of subprojects/dependencies and also runs on the JVM which makes debugging for Java-programmers a little more in-reach than make.
All of that being said, I do use make for some fun personal projects. Automatic failure (a more-powerful "set -e" equivalent in common shells) and dependency tracking mean I can write really powerful automation scripts which can easily parallelize for slow steps.