I actually prefer using Maven and its giant XML files: at least they're declarative, and are easily parsed, transformed, generated, etc. by scripts. Most attempted replacements (Gradle, SBT, etc.) stick with largely the same model (i.e. no extra functionality) but use a full programming language for their "config" (Groovy, Scala, etc.).
The latter gives us a "config" that's subject to Rice's theorem: it's essentially opaque, with no way of knowing what it will do other than executing it. An example I ran into at work: there's no way to list the dependencies of an SBT project (in order to set up an offline sandbox, in our case for reproducible building with Nix). SBT provides commands which claim to do that, but config files often append dependencies based on arbitrary logic; e.g. we had some like "when running unit tests, add this mocking plugin"; since "list dependencies" doesn't run the unit tests, that plugin dependency was missing from the sandbox.
I can't speak to the "publishing" situation for Java, I don't have any experience with it. All of our projects transparently pushed/pulled via a Nix cache, whether we used Java, Scala, Python, NodeJS, etc.