I'll give you gripes with maven/gradle (even though maven tends to just work for me), but look at all of the observability tools like Mission Control, Flight Recorder, and VisualVM. What other language has all of this?

> Gradle projects tend to be even messier because of Groovy's syntax allowing about five different ways of doing the same thing.

Spoken like a true "I've never seen Gradle beyond copy pastes from Stackoverflow". Modern Gradle is all about plugins written in Kotlin. Your buildscripts shouldn't have anything beyond `implementation` block.

> Spoken like a true "I've never seen Gradle beyond copy pastes from Stackoverflow".

Which is what the majority of legacy, grown Gradle scripts are in my experience among multiple government and private companies' projects. The older the project, the worse state the build scripts tend to be. The worst I ever encountered was a project that was mainly done with Maven, but that called out to Gradle and Ant for weird manipulations to get the build artifact to the formats required... gives me nightmares to this day.