Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

I see this effect in Java Maven pom.xml files. It's hard to get a straightforward answer on why each build step is needed, what each attribute means, what parts are optional or mandatory, etc. There seems to be a culture of copying these XML files and tweaking a few things without truly understanding what the whole file means. I briefly looked at Ant and Gradle, and their ecosystems don't look any better. The build configuration files seem to have too much unexplainable magic in them.