Make is only bad under the Autotools mess. Every build-related struggle in an open-source project that uses Autotools can be traced to Autotools, not to make.

Autotools wasn't invented to overcome deficiencies in make, but deficiencies in C portability across Unix flavors.

Those deficiencies are greatly diminished today, both by POSIX standardization, and there being fewer viable surviving Unix variants that anyone cares to build for.