Yes, this is quite important for C projects as it leads to subtle bugs. I also long for a way to let make detect a change of $CC (new build of the compiler itself) in the context of debugging a compiler against third party makefile projects.
Or potentially just specify the path to $CC itself as dependency? Presumably, if the C compiler changes, the timestamp of its executable does too. (Bad if it goes backwards, though.)
Careful, one more step and we'll start recreating nix in Makefiles;)
(Wait, could we? Should we?)
I love it, and I hoped this would become the future of how build-systems are built -- you could automatically parallelise, rebuild, make clean, everything, just by tracking which files are read, and written.
It does add a bit of overhead, but I'd be willing to pay that for simplicity. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have caught on.
ccache can cause things to get built twice, because the first run it sees it tries to read a file, then later writes to it, so it knows something different might happen if you run again -- but then again that is just ccache doing it's thing, so it's quick. Yes, distcc wouldn't work, but then again I find distcc super-brittle (so hard to make sure everything has the same compiler versions, etc), I may have used it 20 years ago, but I don't think I ever would now!