Makefiles fill that great need for a high-level 'scripting DSL', where you have a lot of different programs (or scripts), with a loose set of dependencies or order of operation, and you want a very simple way to call them, with some very simple logic determining the order, arguments to pass, parallelization, etc. Their ubiquity on all platforms makes it even easier to use them.
I much prefer Make to alternatives like Just or Taskfile. Besides the fact that more people know Make, Make actually has incredibly useful functionality that alternatives remove 'for simplicity', but then later you realize you want that functionality and go back to Make. Sometimes old tricks are the best tricks.
Make is conceptually great but brings a lot of legacy baggage. You often need to set up .PHONY targets, reset .SUFFIXES, and/or set MAKEFLAGS += --no-builtin-rules. There's also dollar-symbol variables (which plague Perl and shell as well) which made lots of sense in the 1970s with teletypes but hinder readability today (what the hell was $@ again?).
Or the fact that $FOO interprets as $(F)OO without the slightest warning. And of course if you're in a script line, you probably meant $$FOO..
Make certainly has some obscure variables, but of all the basic knowledge of Make you need to learn, $@ is near the top of the list (it's "target". an @ sign looks kind of like a bullseye. If you want to see it as visiting a dependency graph, it's the dependency you're currently "at").
Sure, if you use make enough, you likely remember the most important dollar-symbol stuff. But $@ is "all arguments (obeying quoting)" in bash, which is nothing like what it means in make.
That of course becomes "$$@" in a Makefile recipe if you want bash's behavior and not make's... which is one of the reasons I tend to keep my shell scripts in separate files, and only grow a Makefile to wrap them later if I have to. These days I just have the directory of scripts and no Makefile. Even the rare times I do C, I prefer a script that recompiles everything and slapping ccache on top of it (but usually I'm dealing with an existing Makefile, and I just pray that it's not generated by automake)
Practically any language will do for running a set of tasks to compile a program. Unless you already love this "wheel" intimately, just learn a real language and use that.
I much prefer Make to alternatives like Just or Taskfile. Besides the fact that more people know Make, Make actually has incredibly useful functionality that alternatives remove 'for simplicity', but then later you realize you want that functionality and go back to Make. Sometimes old tricks are the best tricks.