I believe that one crucial feature of Make is that it does not plan the construction of a target from start to finish but that construction and planning are interleaved: Make does not look at the file system and build a plan which it then executes but it only executes the next step and then looks at the file system again. This precludes using Make to create a shell script (much like a compiler) which is then executed. I'm not sure that this interleaving is present in the description of Make in the article being discussed.

Edits: typos.