As long as you don't get to debug such builds....
As someone that was writing Ant scripts when CruiseControl was modern, and there was no Ivy in sight, not sure if it was such a better place.
I hated Maven at the beggining, exactly because we got some hipster company pushing for it during Maven early days, it was still hot out of the oven.
20 years later, I don't see a reason to use anything else other than Maven.
I'm of the opinion that the world was a better place with Ant and when we had third party dependencies manually, deliberately adn deliberatively managed by hand in /jars/thirdparty