[GrumpyCat42]

My struggle with Make and bash is that they're not very expressive - maybe that's something we want in our CIs, but I've always preferred writing an actual program in that program's native language for CI/CD, even if it has to shell out some commands every now and again.

[ttyprintk]

I prefer that, too. I've heard (less-experienced) tech leads forbid Makefiles because they're not declarative enough compared to yaml.

[a1o]

If you stick with what is in common between ninja build and Makefiles, and comment any usage you do of what isn't, the file will mostly mention a series of inputs -> box -> outputs. What happens is make will dispatch in a way that the inputs are all satisfied. It works fine afaict, the only issue is make doesn't contain by itself the tools that it expects to be available in your environment, so you will still need something else to solve that.