I believe that the biggest problem is that different "compilers" do different amount of work. In the race to win the popularity contest many, and especially newer languages offer compilers packaged with "compiler frontend", i.e. a program that discovers dependencies between files, links individual modules into the target programs or libraries, does code generation etc. This prevents creation of universal build systems.
I.e. javac can be fed inputs of individual Java source files, similar to GCC suite compilers, but Go compiler needs a configuration for the program or the library it compiles. Then there are also systems like Cargo (in Rust) that also do part of the job that the build system has to do for other languages.
From a perspective of someone who'd like to write a more universal build system, encountering stuff like Cargo is extremely disappointing: you immediately realize that you will have to either replace Cargo (and nobody will use your system because Cargo is already the most popular tool and covers the basic needs of many simple projects), or you will have to add a lot of work-arounds and integrations specific to Cargo, depend on their release cycle, patch bugs in someone else's code...
And it's very unfortunate because none of these "compiler frontends" come with support for other languages, CI, testing etc. So, eventually, you will need an extra tool, but by that time the tool that helped you to get by so far will become your worst enemy.
I have seen this first hand with Bazel. You have lots of Bazel rules that are partial reimplementations of the language specific tooling. It usually works better - until you hit a feature that isn’t supported.
I.e. javac can be fed inputs of individual Java source files, similar to GCC suite compilers, but Go compiler needs a configuration for the program or the library it compiles. Then there are also systems like Cargo (in Rust) that also do part of the job that the build system has to do for other languages.
From a perspective of someone who'd like to write a more universal build system, encountering stuff like Cargo is extremely disappointing: you immediately realize that you will have to either replace Cargo (and nobody will use your system because Cargo is already the most popular tool and covers the basic needs of many simple projects), or you will have to add a lot of work-arounds and integrations specific to Cargo, depend on their release cycle, patch bugs in someone else's code...
And it's very unfortunate because none of these "compiler frontends" come with support for other languages, CI, testing etc. So, eventually, you will need an extra tool, but by that time the tool that helped you to get by so far will become your worst enemy.