"The Makefile is the single source of truth for dev commands"

This feels like when you set up a club for a hobby you enjoy, let's say it's beer pong, and you go on holiday for a month, you come back to find that your beer pong club is now full of people just chugging lots of beer and completely ignoring the game.

Please, make is a sophisticated tool with lots of good features. It is NOT a repository for "dev commands" whatever the hell that means. Make is a tool which takes targets, dependencies and recipes and turns them into a DAG which it then executes based on a set of criteria. If you want a glorified shell script which runs commands, why not just do a bash script with a switch in it? It's certainly going to behave a lot more like you expect. Why call it cake when it has almost nothing to do with make?

Give my Run tool a try:

Run: Easily manage and invoke small scripts and wrappers https://github.com/TekWizely/run