A nice thing about this approach is that it passes more control to the user who is essentially now responsible for resolving the dependency graph themselves and “be” the executor. Taking your cooking example, the declarative nature better exposes where there are open choices in what to do next, which affords the user more freedom to take into account other externalities and constraints not formally specified in the makefile (like specific orderings that make washing up easier).

Of course the tradeoff is that you have to resolve the dependency graph yourself. That’s more work on you when you just want a set of pre-serialised, sequential steps to follow.