...but so are bash scripts.
I wouldn't advocate actually using either of these though, unless the situation is appropriate.
Every system and platform has different requirements, and its a bit of a big ask to want make to be 'the right tool' for all of them.
Certainly, I'd never use make to look after a ruby project, or a c project. That doesn't mean I think make is horrible and I'd never use it for anything, but you can see, perhaps, how something as low level as make might not provide all the tools (dependency management, downloading resources from git hub, automatically tracking system information, a templating system for generating system-dependent headers) you might need for some things.
You could think about it this way: If make did all of these things and was easy to use, there wouldnt be all of these other clones and different attempts at the same thing.
...but there are. So there's certainly something about it isn't making people happy.