You mean the same make that has multiple abstractions built on top of it (cmake, scons, autotools, etc...)?

Snark aside, just because a product exists doesn't mean it's perfect, it doesn't mean that it can't be improved on.

Gulp is significantly easier to work with than make for many usecases, and tools like webpack aren't really comparable to make.

Make doesn't solve all the problems those tools solve.

A lot:

https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=make+build