Make is really fast, and it's good at doing parallel builds (you just have to specify -j). You could try making something better in Python, but it would take a long time to write and Make is already here. You apparently had the opposite experience from me. I hate NPM build systems like Grunt and Gulp because they're hard to debug. Make is easy—keep the files around and tweak the command line until it works.

No idea how you missed the -j option.