I work in a similar field and this is accurate for us too, except our tools do at least have some integration with Make (you can generate makefiles from the proprietary project files, although it's not useful to us and we don't use it). Like most (I assume), we've built our own build language/system on top of Make. It works but only in a few well-defined ways that modern software shops would probably baulk at. We don't support parallel builds, no caching, only coarse grained incremental builds (at a subproject/library level) and who knows what else that others benefit from.

I've only looked at modern tools briefly but everytime I come away realising we'd have to re-write everything. There is no out-of-the-box support for our tools/language and it would be a lot of work to learn someone else's DSL, re-implement everything and then potentially discover a load of ways it's broken for our workflow. Personally I think it'd be worth it in the long run but it's a really hard sell.