IntelliJ is far and away above any other IDE and is well worth the paid license imho. It's a professional tool written by and for professionals. VSCode and Eclipse have some inertia in very particular workflows/tools and a few different (valid) ways of operating, but nothing is as polished and cohesive as the JetBrains.
Gradle, however, is a dumpster-fire of footguns and obtuse and non-debug-able DSLs.