people still use make for things. how many stand-alone utilities require npm?

i don't know graalvm, but I've used too much ant, buldr, gradle and maven. I'm not really convinced Graal VM would make anything better just because you are more familiar with it.

The author even says to just use what you like because that part doesn't matter.

ant, buldr, gradle and maven - are build tools

we're talking about native code here