By that logic, you could say that leiningen and gradle hide the very awful maven build system, and maybe if they didn't exist, the daily pain of working with maven would be enough that it would actually be improved.

But it's been well over a decade. Maven is maven, npm is npm, make is make. Yarn is doing a good job now of being the new and improved build system for JS projects, and create-react-app seems to be using it under the hood.

Eventually I may care about what compilation flags lein passes to maven in order for it to compile my clojure project into jvm bytecode, but that day hasn't happened yet and I've been glad not to have to set those up with every clojure project I start. The same now applies to react apps.