Glad you found a solution. Shameless self-plug Want to use makefile but not dfx? You are not alone! - Developers / Command Line Tools - Internet Computer Developer Forum (dfinity.org)
Notably the code that creates canister is ic-utils/canister-ledger at main · ninegua/ic-utils · GitHub. The preferred way of talking to the ledger canister is still protobuf. Hopefully we’ll see candid API brought up to par.