Just because you have strats to minimize your exposure to something terrible doesn't mean the thing is less terrible.

But I'd do exactly the same with .phony targets in a Makefile. Keep the targets short and move larger chunks of code to individual script files that are just called from the Makefile

I don't disagree with any of that.

I just prefer Python to make, it's easier for me and most colleagues I met to write and to debug. And making a custom Python function when I need more than bash inside the dodo file is great.

But for someone used to make, why not used it?