I end up using Makefiles for many projects that have even trivial stages in their execution (e.g. manual/one-off ETL pipelines). I do feel like I bastardize it sometimes as a convenient command runner or brain augmentation: sure makes it easy to remember how to run something if you can just type "make" or look at the top of the file, a cool intersection between "can get it working in 5 minutes" and "will be readable in 5 months".

The Just command runner [1] is good, but is not as ubiquitous.

[1]: https://github.com/casey/just