Wait, make has a global state? I was under the impression most make targets are stored somewhere in the project itself (like a build/ directory). I think this is a fine approach, BTW. I think global state should be avoided unless necessary.
Make does what you tell it to do. While some projects have the setup that you've described, many others do not. Make will only check the timestamps of the generated assets and decide to build (or not) based on that.
