You can pass arguments via the command line (it is, after all, a CLI tool): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2826029/passing-addition...

I mean there's really not much difference between "VAR=val make x" and "make x VAR=val" now is there?

Syntactically? No. Semantically? Yes.

I'm guessing the syntax was the part the poster was complaining about when they complained about the "dev experience".

	▲	marginalia_nu 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Dunno, there are other aspects of environment variables that deteriorate the dev experience. They're very conducive to spooky action at a distance, since they're silently being passed along from parent-process to child-process (except when they aren't). They can cause a lot of annoying bugs, and sometimes it's hard to track down where they are coming from (especially when dealing with stuff running in containers).