The "caveats" section in its docs hints at it, but to be explicit: no_panic is a band-aid that can break when changing optimizer options or compiler/llvm version. It's not a good option for library crates, e.g.
That being said, I'm not at all happy with all the complexity and ecosystem fragmentation that async brought. I understand what you're saying. But surprise panics is a bit of a pain point for me.
You still get bash scripts in the targets, with $ escape hell and weirdness around multiline scripts, ordering & parallelism control headaches, and no support for background services.
The only sane use for Makefiles is running a few simple commands in independent targets, but do you really need make then?
(The argument that "everyone has it installed" is moot to me. I don't.)