I did some Java development on windows NT 3.51 and a 486 (33Mhz?) back in 1996. Worked fine. That was considered a fast machine at the time. I used Ultraedit and IBM's jikes incremental compiler. We were building some applet. Builds took a few seconds with jikes (as opposed to using javac that came with the jdk). There were no ant, maven, or gradle wasting more time. I had a little batch file that set up the classpath just right and then called the compiler.

That setup was actually faster than building kotlin projects on my current mac M1 laptop. Of course it's doing more stuff these days but build times seem a constant through the ages. Better hardware just leads to more complicated tooling.