What are some examples of that? Shell can do basically everything make can. The syntax of both is ugly but I'll grant that make is more uniform.

And btw there is no way to use make without shell, but you can use shell without make.

I guess it probably comes down to preference, but I can take a list, write a one-line .c->.o transform, a one-line link target, add in a clean target etc etc faster with make.

Sure, I can write these as functions in bash, call once for each source file, check return codes etc etc, but I find expressing dependencies faster than writing anything like robust code in shell, and make deals with failed steps by stopping.

And as you rightly pointed out above - once you get the dependencies nailed down, you can parallel build trivially.