I generally prefer Make as well and I even made the case for Make when Grunt.js was first announced [1]. That said, I did use Grunt on a recent project and it worked out reasonably well. For myself, I'd prefer to keep using Make, but for many teams, Grunt is a reasonable choice.
I chose Grunt because Make generally requires a lot more background knowledge and ongoing discipline. Most Grunt tasks are configured by relatively constrained JSON data, so it's pretty hard for non-experts to muck it up unless they need to write a custom task. A Makefile would have created much greater education burden for me. That's particularly a concern when the team's Make/shell expert has time-limited involvement with the project.
I chose Grunt because Make generally requires a lot more background knowledge and ongoing discipline. Most Grunt tasks are configured by relatively constrained JSON data, so it's pretty hard for non-experts to muck it up unless they need to write a custom task. A Makefile would have created much greater education burden for me. That's particularly a concern when the team's Make/shell expert has time-limited involvement with the project.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3777393