There are certainly a lot of tools that are more complicated than necessary, but Make as a tool isn’t a good example of that, IMO. With modern tooling, more often than not the complexity problem is compounded by insufficient documentation, the existing documentation being predominantly cookbook-style and not explaining the conceptual models needed to reason about how the tool works, nor providing a detailed and precise enough specification of the tool. That isn’t the case for Make, which is well-documented and not difficult to get a good grasp on, if one only takes the time to actually read the documentation.
The cookbook orientation mentioned above in turn leads to a culture that underemphasizes the importance of learning and understanding the tools that one is using, and of having thorough documentation that facilitates that. Or maybe the direction of causation is the other way around. In any case, I see the problem more in too little time being spent in creating comprehensive and up-to-date documentation on tooling (and designing the tooling to be amenable to that in the first place), and in too little resources being allocated to teaching and learning the necessary tooling.