This is basically the case where you don't (or it's infeasible to) capture the dependences fully, so you want to rebuild everything from target onwards after some change.
Haha, well pointed out. I'm clearly having trouble parsing today.
"rm target; make" can work, but only if you're using a pattern for data pipelines where there is only one default set of downstream targets. If the one Makefile supports a range of downstream targets, then this won't work.
I concede, make doesn't support that operation out of the box :)
In that case: "rm target; make target"