Quite the contrary: I've had to maintain or incorporate some non-standard build processes into several build systems (mostly scons, waf, gyp), and in each one it was difficult or impossible to express what I wanted because the build system wasn't as general as Make.
The single most valuable thing Make has going for it is that the primitive is a Unix pipeline. Anything that can be built with tools you can invoke from your shell can be built with Make, and the language of action is about as universal as it gets for Unix-like systems.
Yes, the dependency syntax is somewhat confusing, and it's not obvious how to understand and debug Makefiles at first glance, but the GNU make documentation is decent, and time spent learning the language and the tools (e.g., "make -d") is much better than trying to reinvent the system, especially without understanding it. Every reinvention I've had the displeasure of working with missed some important (if not widespread) use case.
The single most valuable thing Make has going for it is that the primitive is a Unix pipeline. Anything that can be built with tools you can invoke from your shell can be built with Make, and the language of action is about as universal as it gets for Unix-like systems.
Yes, the dependency syntax is somewhat confusing, and it's not obvious how to understand and debug Makefiles at first glance, but the GNU make documentation is decent, and time spent learning the language and the tools (e.g., "make -d") is much better than trying to reinvent the system, especially without understanding it. Every reinvention I've had the displeasure of working with missed some important (if not widespread) use case.