The one common paradigm of Makefiles I'm enjoying (and using myself) is the pattern for enabling more verbose logging.

  ifeq ($(V),1)
  Q :=
  else
  Q := @
  endif

  somerule: 
    $(Q)$(CC) -c $^ -o $@

  $ make V=1

It's mentioned in this article and I suggest everyone use it in their Makefiles, for when the time comes for me and others to debug it.

There's no need to write $(V) and $(Q) since they are single letter variables you can just do $V or $Q. Of course, you may prefer the more verbose version.

While CMake & Bazel are gaining in popularity, Make is still the de-facto standard for firmware projects. It certainly is miles better than some of the XML-based, GUI-first build systems IDEs bundled with Keil or IAR.