There's a lot to hate about make, but looking for good alternatives there are very, very few out there and none of them provided anything extra I was looking for.
The one thing I wish were possible (trivially) in make, and I understand why it's not, is the ability to define a dependency not on whether a file exists or not but on the result of executing a process.
For example, do I need to rebuild this docker container? The current method to determine that is to create a stamp file; create the docker container then `touch .docker-image-created.stamp`. Unfortunately, those stamps can become out of date if the docker container is removed (or old, etc.) so it leads to confusing situations where make's interpretation of the current state is separate from the reality, and in large complex projects where there are lots of interconnected parts, sometimes your only feasible route is to remove everything and completely rebuild from scratch.
There's also an inexplicable lack of debugging output insofar as printing what target make is currently running. It has a ton of debug output, but no option I can find that says "I am running this target right now", "okay I'm done this target now" without manually adding $(info ...) statements to your makefile.