It's easy to collect and verify metadata involving the hashes of intermediate artifacts such that readers can observe it and trust that the charts correspond with the data because they trust whoever published the metadata. This could be automatic, just part of the reader.
The trouble with make is that unless you're very disciplined or very lucky, if you build the images and documents on your machine and I do the same on mine, we're going to get artifacts that look similar but hash differently, if for no other reason than that there's a timestamp showing up somewhere and throwing it off (though often for more concerning reasons involving the versions of whatever your Makefile is calling).
That prevents any kind of automated consensus finding about the functional dependency between the artifacts. Now reviewers must rebuild the artifacts themselves and compare the outputs visually before they can be assured that the data and visualizations are indeed connected.
So if we want to get to a place where papers can be more readily trusted--a place where the parts of research that can be replicated automatically, are replicated automatically, then we're going to need something that provides a bit more structure than make (something like nix, with a front end like Jacquard lab notebook).
The idea that we could take some verifiable computational step and represent it in a UI such that the status of that verification is accessible, rather than treating the makefile as an authoritative black box... I think it's rather exciting. Even if I don't really care about the UI so much, having the computational structure be accessible is important.