And now we're back at: this is why C is more difficult, for no good reason, than the alternatives. For small projects that you're only building locally, your approach may work. Once you expect any sort of cross-platform compatibility and/or start distributing your project to others, this approach falls apart and fast. Instead of focusing on development you'll be focusing on playing whack-a-mole with incompatibilities between the different shells (or versions of make, etc.) offered on different operating systems.

Again the problem is that no package/dependency management for C/C++ means that C is balkanized and more difficult to deal with compared to other languages. Using third party libraries in C is far more difficult and error prone than it ought to be.

Pretty much every language that provides more comprehensive dependency management also provides easy enough access to allow you to NIH/DIY it if you need/want to. For instance contrast this with something like rust where cargo is standard across all supported platforms and provides proper dependency management. You can still call the rust compiler (rustc) and whatever linker yourself if you so desire.