I recently spent a week replacing all Makefiles in a reasonably complex embedded arm project I maintain with apenwarr's redo [1] (revamping our cobbled-together CI).. Which allows recursive make structured .do files, without tbe downsides - global dependencies and build state is cached across invocations in a throw-away .redo directory. It's an absolute joy to be able to stamp things that aren't files (eg docker containers) and just use one syntax (script of your choice) to orchestrate builds.
Cross-compiled kernel, bootloader, custom packages, full distro rootfs to final sdcard image without a single Makefile. I owe that man a beer.