Short term usability is not the same as long term usability
The general point the author is making sounds true but I am sceptical regarding any criticism against make. Building and&#x2F;or handling dependencies was basically a solved problem as soon as make was invented and all of the new stuff in this area just seems plainly unneeded to me. Also, when people invent new build systems one can end up with projects where one part is built using one build system and another part is using another. Since things can depend on each other in arbitrarily complex ways because of code generation this will lead to build either too much or too little. In particular having a build system for a particular language is such a strange concept.