IMHO just bite the bullet and start with CMake. Make is such a pain to learn and is instantly useless once you realize you're going to need CMake at some point in your career anyway.
Make is simple and good-enough for most cases. I use this: https://github.com/dkogan/mrbuild
But it's not special and there are lots like it. And they are all infinitely better than cmake
I’ve written a small Makefile to learn the basic and backgrounds. Make itself is fine. But the next higher level would have been Autotools. Which is an intimidating and weird set of tools. Most new stuff written in C/C++ use now Meson and it feels sane.
If your code only ever runs with gcc on Linux though, Make works pretty well..