I like the idea of Just (and the many tools like it), I only wish it had come along a few decades earlier. Make has the advantage of being a ubiquitous de facto standard. It is probably already installed anywhere you want to deploy your repo, or can be very easily installed with one command.

As a personal preference, I actually do tend to avoid Make as a task runner because a quick shell script is almost as easy to write and far more flexible. I am pretty familiar with Make but have still painted myself into a corner with it more times than I'd like to admit.