I have written some large build systems entirely in Make. More complex things tend to rely on templates, but you can build arbitrary things, with two main limitations:

The error messages are awful, particularly if using templates. "Unexpected separator. Stop" is a classic, with no indication where in your 2k lines of Make it might be.

You can't have file or folder names with spaces in (usually including any parent folder to where your code is checked out). A "list" in Make is a series of strings separated by spaces. There are various workarounds that people suggest, but none of them work consistently across platforms. You just have to avoid spaces. At least this is less bad since Windows stopped using "Documents and Settings" for "home" folders.