<i>Make is never going away, it&#x27;s so fundamental that we&#x27;ll be using it in 20 years.</i><p>I really hope not.<p>There is plenty to criticise about recent build tools for web projects. Many are absurdly over-engineered. Most have very short working lives. Almost all seem to have a crazy number of dependencies of their own drawn from a fragile ecosystem.<p>But there is also plenty to criticise in traditional Make. The archaic and cumbersome syntax means makefiles are hard to read, analyse and maintain. The completely static nature of a makefile also means it is ill-suited to rapidly evolving codebases where new files come and go almost by the minute as we refactor. We can do <i>much</i> better than Make.