Yes, but 99% of the makefiles you encounter in the wild comes from autotools.

This isn't at all true, in my experience. If it's true for you, please consider that your issues are about autotools and not Make, and direct your complaints in that direction.

I use Make for all kinds of general-purpose build automation tasks, and as kind of a top-level catch all. No Autotools to be found in them (except maybe if called from some recipe).

the vast majority of the ones I encounter are from cmake...