People sometimes treat it as a generic “project specific job runner”, which it’s not a good fit for. Even simple conditionals are difficult.
I’ve seen several well-intentioned attempts at wrapping Terraform with it, for example, which have ended terribly.
This is no longer true imo.
More robust and well-defined build systems have been created in the last 2 decades. Time to update.
Edit: Sorry, it looks like I totally misunderstood what you meant by "job runner".
People keep writing and using other alternatives (like just), which provide a very slight improvement on pure shell at the cost of installing yet another tool everywhere.
I stick with bash, write every task as a separate function, and multiplex between them with a case statement (which supports globs et al. and is very readable).
Now when I need a tool, I can knock it out in bash with proper option parsing, usage, etc.
bash is awful on a lot of fronts, but if you're writing code that's primarily calling a bunch of tools and mucking with their output, it's still the best thing out there I've found just due to piping syntax.