Few interesting articles on people using Make / makefile for javascript:
https://blog.jcoglan.com/2014/02/05/building-javascript-projects-with-make/
https://algorithms.rdio.com/post/make/
http://www.sitepoint.com/using-gnu-make-front-end-development-build-tool/
And on a related note, this is someone who advocates using npm scripts instead of grunt or gulp:
http://blog.keithcirkel.co.uk/why-we-should-stop-using-grunt/
http://blog.keithcirkel.co.uk/how-to-use-npm-as-a-build-tool/