It's easy; there's mill, maven and fury. Mill is quite good - but I've had to dive into the source code a few times to do things.
If you're dealing with dependencies only, then it's a straightforward change. OTOH I've never had an issue with SBT since it's cleanup a couple of years back so YMMV.
If you're already used to the JVM, it's easy: just use whatever you were using before (e.g. Maven) and everything works the way you expect it to.
If you're not, the documentation is missing as you say. Maven does just work, but the documentation assumes you're using Java.
Especially for those coming from languages like Python and Go, where the former has no build system (ignoring setup.py), or an almost universal one (go build, sometimes make).
All of the projects I have touched are documented using sbt, and transitioning the build process for existing code projects while a new language learner is a double cognitive load.