Watchexec | Hugonweb Annotated Link Bibliography
https://github.com/watchexec/watchexec
watchexec can rerun a command when a set of files is modified and is designed for ease of use. Two examples from the README are:
$ watchexec -e js,css,html npm run build
$ watchexec -r -e py -- python server.py
Frustratingly, it's not a Debian package. Installation with cargo install --locked watchexec-cli
isn't hard, but you don't have much control over 300+ dependencies.