curious. what exactly is wrong with sbt? I used it once of twice when I was learning scala and I liked it a LOT more than gradle/maven. To the point where I actually opted to use it with my Kotlin projects later.
The only problem is, once you've tried out Rust, it will be difficult for you to come back to Scala.
I no longer program in Scala, but I used to for my previous job and I regularly came across build files I couldn't understand -- and when I asked the person who wrote them, they couldn't explain their build properly either.
And this happened in enough cases that I wouldn't consider it an exception or a problem with a particular developer. SBT used to have two entirely separate syntaxes, and it was a mess translating from one to the other. I don't know if this is still the case (I know one of the two syntaxes got deprecated, can't remember which one now).
The proponents of the approach that sbt takes have failed to realise that build tools have zero value whatsoever, every second spent on them is a second wasted.
What you want is a good mix simplicity (yes copy paste is fine) and some basic examples to follow, and the ability to break out into script if you are doing something unusual.