The recommended Makefile has several issues, not least of which being that it relies on dependency fulfilment order which can be non-deterministic (e.g. if you pass -j).

The project structure includes flavour-of-the-week litter like .devcontainer, .github, .vscode.

compile_commands.json should be getting generated, not stored.

Not sure if I would recommend anyone follow this information.

The build system situation in the C world is dire. And I should know, given I write my own build systems for C.

I would say, while I've never actually used it, Meson seems the least non-sensical out of the box experience.

Ideal in some ways but not in others is designing and implementing your own build system because genuinely everything else out there has some major shortcoming or other.

If you are insistent on make, stick to GNU make, read the GNU make manual, understand make and then write something simple and non-recursive.

This is the most recent Makefile I helped create:

    CXX ?= clang++
    CXXFLAGS += -std=c++20 -Wall -Wextra -fsanitize=address -ggdb3 -MMD -MP
    LDFLAGS += -fsanitize=address
    
    OBJ := program.o parse.o
    
    all: program compile_flags.txt
    
    program: $(OBJ)
            $(CXX) $(LDFLAGS) $(TARGET_ARCH) $^ $(LDLIBS) -o $@
    
    $(OBJ): Makefile
    
    compile_flags.txt: Makefile
            printf "%s\n" $(CXXFLAGS) >$@
    
    clean:
            $(RM) *.o *.d program compile_flags.txt
    
    -include $(OBJ:.o=.d)
    
    .PHONY: clean

If you want to do something like run a linter, code formatter, etc, before building, then this should be performed by a script which calls into make. Make is not designed to be used as a switch statement for your bash snippets.