Why are there so many JavaScript build tools? Gulp, Grunt, Webpack, Laravel Mix, Rollup.js, and now Vite. And these are just the ones that I've worked with. Haven't we solved this problem? And why build a new tool? Why not improve existing tools?

I think about predecessors like GNU Make. Sure, it's old, but it's tried and true. The invocation is consistent and has been for years: make [command].

How different would the world be if the Node.js ecosystem adopted Make as the preferred mechanism for running scripts, instead of npm run [command]? I guess we'd be seeing a lot more Makefile's around.