This is good, their builds will fail, notifying them of their misconfiguration in the most obvious way possible. Hopefully they will have to customize the Makefile a little to build on their system, and give it a build before they start programming, so they can correct their editor before they do any damage to the source code.
Sure, it also won't catch the misconfiguration for those who don't even open the Makefile. It is too optimistic to hope that this venerable piece of software will solve all out misconfiguration woes, but at least it provides a possible red flag sometimes.