I'm not sure about now, but in the past every time I touched Java projects, it just seemed really wonky as well. I see a lot of that carries to the "enterprise" side of both areas. But will say C# was much easier to get a grasp of both with and without tooling for me.

NuGet, I'm still not sure of either, but at least it mostly works transparently. Though I haven't actually tried publishing anything to it, only consumed. npm seems to have the least resistance imho, for good and bad results alike.