Why does the word "be" change so much?

In the phrase make <someone> {adjective}, it implies changing that person's emotion, but make <someone> be {adjective} implies forcing that person to comply.

Why does the word "be", which only has to do with a subject's state of being, make so much of an implication difference?

I see that there's already an excellent answer framed in linguistic analysis, so I'll come at this interesting question from another direction.

If we grab an online definition of make (from MW)

to cause to happen to or be experienced by someone

and another definition of be (from OD

Used to indicate something due to happen... to express obligation or necessity... to express possibility

we can begin to see the make...be combination as a kind of intensifier, implying an imperative/coercive/causative situation.

Furthermore, if we cling to the sense of make as a near synonym with cause, we might imagine a make...be sentence such as

With a wave of his wand, he made the children be quiet.

as a sort of ellipsis of the infinitive particle to - as if to say he made the children to be quiet.

Of course this does little to explain why "make" and "be" dance this particular grammatical gavotte, other than to demonstrate that, as the man said, "be" is the equivalent of duct tape and WD40 in the English language's toolbox.

Interesting question.

I would say that it is because in the simple sentence "X is [adjective]" , 'is' is the copula: it is syntactic sugar, with no semantics of its own. So in "Y makes X [adjective]" the copula is not needed syntactically, and is omitted.

So if "be" is included in "Y makes X be [adjective], it is (usually) not just a copula, but a full verb, and "make" is a proper causative, causing X to perform the verb, just like "Y makes X sit down".