Which seems bizarre to me. The normal recommendation I've seen is that if the only make you have is nmake, the first thing you do is get a better make.

While that may or may not be your personal conviction, this is not good advice to use when trying to find the appropriate make tool to use with your Perl tool chain.

For Perl, you use whatever make tool is listed by:

perl -V:make
[download]

On Strawberry Perl, this is dmake, and dmake happens to be shipped with Strawberry Perl already.

On (older versions of) ActiveState Perl and many things using the MSVC tool chain, this outputs nmake and it behooves you to use nmake as your build tool then, because all the tools within the Perl ecosystem that care about $Config{make} will output Makefiles compatible with the nmake slang of make then.