Just has a lot of UI/UX improvements over Make, like a way to list available recipes, convenient ways to define command-line parameters to recipes, consistent and easy syntax, and a whole lot of predefined functions and variables to cover common use cases like finding the number of CPUs on the current system, manipulate strings, etc. It doesn't do things that Make can't do, because Make can do anything a shell script can if you don't mind wrestling it into submission. It just does those things much more easily.
But it still has a few warts. Recipes look a lot like a shell script, but they're evaluated separately line-by-line, so you can't set a variable on one line and then read it in another. There are workarounds, but that's the default behavior. And a lot of the time when I'd want a task runner, I also want an environment manager (like uv or cargo or node/npm), so bundling those together matches my workflow better than managing those separately.
I have zero bad to say about Just. It's freaking awesome. If Mise disappeared, I'd go back to using Just. I just prefer Mise right now.
