Fortunately there are plenty of blog posts from Gradle blog and conference talks that prove otherwise.
Again just Google IO 2019 has three talks about tackling build performance issues.
Maven never required a build performance profiler tool.
Gradle is just like Ant, give DevOps a programming language DSL and they will make a mess of build scripts.
I've never had a gradle build that didn't manage to remember I've only just compiled the code and haven't changed any of it. I can't remember ever having a maven build that could tell I didn't need to compile every single time. And the same the whole of the way down the stack.
Nice attempt to imply gradle isn't declarative though.