This would only be true if the entirety of thr GNU suite were necessary for GNU make to work. But it's not, so I always find this kind of argument really weird.
I mean it's not necessarily completely irrelevant criticism, but I somehow only see this level of criticism aimed at GNU tools.
I haven't seen many "you know let's make a variant of ninja because the current one is too ideological let's find another one that's still ninja but has slight differences that we 'all' agree are more basic or standardised somehow".