And after you have read it, read the documentation of apenwarr's implementation of djb's "redo", and see how everything about make can be simplified to the point that a 150 line portable bash script can be used as a non-dependency-tracking replacement (that is, rebuild everything on each run).
redo makes everything much simpler, more consistent, more dependable, and more robust. e.g all files are atomically replaced; dependencies are checked by a crypto hash of the content; dependency setup is sane; and it's all faster than make.
