A better name for this might be the JCL effect, as even experienced mainframe sysprogs copypasta the JCL it takes to build their COBOL programs from a known-good example and then mutatis the mutandis, rather than attempt to build a mental model of how JCL works from the impenetrable documentation and write JCL de novo.
It's no big deal to me to write a small Makefile from scratch. My editor (Emacs) even knows to always use tabs when I hit TAB in a Makefile, removing the confusion of whether I inserted tabs (correct) or spaces (horribly incorrect) on the lines with the commands to build a particular target.