I'm running into the same problem. I think this is because serve uses buildTarget to depend on build, which is an Angular executor argument that is unaware of Nx's dependsOn properties. It's not an "Nx executor", it's an Angular one. You'd have to specify a (seemingly redundant) chain of dependsOn in both build and serve to have it "fall through" like this.

Unfortunately, e2e is often configured a similar way, with a devServerTarget executor argument that points to serve. So it seems like in a regular app you'd even have to specify a dependsOn chain up to three levels.

Did you figure out any alternative to this? I'm unsure about reporting it as an issue to Nx because it seems like it's "as designed".