Ha, I've written a lot of these Makefiles and the "make dev" command even became a personal standard that I added to each project. I don't know if I read about that, or if it just developed into that because it just makes sense.
In the last few years, these commands very often started a docker container, though.
I do tend to work on Windows with WSL and I most of my colleagues use macOS or Linux, so that's definitely one of the reasons why docker is just easier there.