I find these posts somewhat amusing. We've got people who (rightfully) question the tools they use and look for alternatives. They then discover Make and have some kind of zen Unix moment that they want to share with the world.

If what you are doing in your flavor-of-the-month build tool translates to a roughly equivalent number of lines in Make, then yes, you should probably look at using Make. But the thing is, Make is stupid, it doesn't know a lot. Sometimes that is a good thing, sometimes it is not.

I've written about this before on HN: I mostly program in C++ and when I build my stuff I want a build tool that understands things like header dependencies, optimization levels, shared libraries etc. It's a bonus if my build files are portable.

My point is that these alternative tools often strive to raise the abstraction level and the reason people use them isn't necessarily because they haven't discovered Make.