But those are things that he’ll learn about as he keeps using make. And why does it matter that some editors don’t know about makefiles? The one he is using handles them just fine so what’s the problem?
Because it isn't fun checking if the whitespace at the beginning of the line is a tab or spaces. And as said, you must know when to use tabs and/or spaces in rules.
For doing such a simple thing as calling some commands, Make has way too many subtle footguns which _will_ bite somebody, someday. The problem (that's not a problém at all, that's a reason to celebrate!) is that most JS devs and users aren't used to Make, compared to e.g. C programmers. To rephrase: as someone writing C, you have to use something like a Makefile, as anything else (like scripts) gets unreadable and -usable quite fast. But if you can get away with a less complex solution, you should really use that instead of Make.
that's why https://editorconfig.org/ exists, so that neither you nor your teammates have to think about these things
You're better off using a Makefile linter. But you must know about the problem before being able to solve it. And error messages like
Makefile:2: *** missing separator. Stop.
Is that Stockholm syndrome? Or an appeal to history/authority in action? What makes people believe that this is even remotely reasonable.
inb kids these days, I started in the '90s and wrote my share of makefiles. Tolerating make only made sense until 2010-ish, then both hw and sw advances rendered it useless.
Edit: just realized my reply to a wrong person, but let it stay here