My day job is on a modular monolith that uses mvn. I'm no expert but I've set up some IT's, setup build pipeline from jenkins, configure some plugins on various steps of the lifecycle, etc. and I guess it's ok, xml takes a lot of space though and it gets ridiculous on big code bases.

I've been working on an android app and use gradle with the kotlin dsl. I haven't really done any programming with the build steps but this is pretty sexy and doesn't need three open/close tags every plugin.

  dependencies {
    implementation(fileTree(mapOf("dir" to "libs", "include" to listOf("*.jar"))))
    implementation("com.google.android.material:material:1.2.0")

Gradle used to use groovy dsl, but with kotlin the syntax is more consistent and auto complete is actually useful.