I resisted learning Make because of the clunkiness around it (Tab-indentation? C-specific features? Gross!), but after using it a few times now I've come to appreciate it.

Most recent case was for Starbound mods. The macOS and Linux versions of Starbound don't ship with any built-in tools for uploading mods to the Steam Workshop (unlike Windows, which apparently has a dedicated GUI for it), and I didn't want to have to manually go through a bunch of SteamCMD steps every time I wanted to publish an update, so for my first real mod I put together a Makefile to automatically pack all the files together (using Starbound's included asset_packer CLI tool), populate a metadata.vdf for the Steam Workshop, and run the right steamcmd incantations to get everything up. Once that was reliably working, I condensed everything into a GitHub template repo (https://github.com/YellowApple/Starbound-Mod) and ended up with a pretty straightforward (albeit a bit clunky in spots) universal Makefile:

    MODNAME  = StarboundMod
    
    ifeq "$(shell uname)" "Linux"
    PLATFORM = linux
    endif
    ifeq "$(shell uname)" "Darwin"
    PLATFORM = macos
    endif
    
    SB_PACKER = ../../$(PLATFORM)/asset_packer
    OUT  = ./out
    
    SRC_DIRS =  achievements ai animations behaviors biomes \
       celestial cinematics codex collections \
       cursors damage dialog dungeons effects \
       humanoid interface items leveling liquids \
       monsters music names npcs objects parallax \
       particles plants player projectiles quests \
       radiomessages recipes rendering scripts sfx \
       ships sky spawntypes species stagehands stats \
       tech tenants terrain tiles tilesets treasure \
       vehicles versioning weather
    SRC_EXTS = config macros patch png wav
    
    STEAMCMD = steamcmd +login $(STEAMCMD_USER)
    STEAM_ID_PARSER = awk '/"publishedfileid"/{print $$2}' \
       metadata.vdf | sed 's/"//g'
    
    $(OUT)/pkg/contents.pak: $(SRC_DIRS) $(SRC_EXTS)
     rm -rf $(OUT)/pkg
     mkdir -p $(OUT)/pkg
     $(SB_PACKER) $(OUT)/src $(OUT)/pkg/$(MODNAME).pak
    
    $(OUT)/src:
     rm -rf $(OUT)/src
     mkdir -p $(OUT)/src
     cp _metadata $(OUT)/src/
    
    $(SRC_DIRS): FORCE $(OUT)/src
     @cp -rv $@ $(OUT)/src/$@ 2>/dev/null \
      || echo 'No $@ folder present in mod root; skipping'
    
    $(SRC_EXTS): FORCE $(OUT)/src
     @cp -v *.$@ $(OUT)/src/ 2>/dev/null \
      || echo 'No *.$@ files present in mod root; skipping'
    
    upload: $(OUT)/pkg/contents.pak
     mkdir -p $(OUT)/workshop
     cp $(OUT)/pkg/$(MODNAME).pak $(OUT)/workshop/contents.pak
     cp preview.jpg $(OUT)/preview.jpg
     sed 's,{{PWD}},$(PWD),g' <metadata.vdf.template >metadata.vdf
     $(STEAMCMD) +workshop_build_item $(PWD)/metadata.vdf +quit
     $(eval STEAM_ID=$(shell $(STEAM_ID_PARSER)))
     sed -i 's/"publishedfileid" "0"/"publishedfileid" "$(STEAM_ID)"/g' \
      metadata.vdf.template
    
    clean: FORCE
     rm -rf $(OUT)
     rm -f metadata.vdf
    
    FORCE:
    

All in all, it works well enough. Certainly nicer than trying to do it with shell scripts IMO, and I don't have to worry quite as much about whether someone else using my mod template (including my future self) is able to install some fancier build tool / task runner given how ubiquitous (GNU) Make tends to be.