Use the best tool for the job. Your advice is probably correct for whichever apps you've written in the past, but it's definitely not correct in the general case. Appropriate tools are highly dependent on what you're building. In my area of experience make has been more than adequate (crossplatform games and Erlang servers with rebar + make). Yes the syntax is arcane and ugly but it does a fine job.
While my advice might not be directly applicable in the general sense, I maintain that the headline advice of the article is wrong in the general sense.
Also, I quite specifically didn't claim that make is never the right choice.
