> the desire and demand for complex build systems is silly

No it isn't. "Simple" build systems like Make don't solve many of the problems that "complex" build systems like Bazel do.

At my current company I tried to convince my boss at the start of our project to use Bazel (it's very difficult to change build systems once your project is big), because I knew from experience it would solve many problems we would eventually run into.

He wouldn't let me and wanted to keep things "simple". Guess what happened? Now we have to run dozens of hours of CI just to fix a typo in a comment. CI regularly breaks because people forget dependencies. Etc.

Make is definitely not a simple system. In tsodings latest stream about this project he actually implemented a small build/test runner system for it that is really simple.

But actually I would disagree with the commenter you replied to. I think the main goal of this project seems to just be doing it for fun.

I would argue that the baseline for a "simple build system" is DJB Redo.