Funny, I'd've expected the opposite in the Java ecosystem. As someone entirely outside of it: why would one then use Gradle? Haven't seen a single positive post here yet.
What I really hate though is that it's designed around a principle of everything happening 'magically' such that when something goes wrong it is nearly impossible to mechanistically understand what happened and how to fix it. It really leans into the most negative aspects of Groovy and amplifies them.
The downside is that it is insanely complex, and nearly impenetrable for newbies. It’s also for the same reason pretty Perl-like (a “write-only” language)
I guess there is only bazel and gradle that are on this level of capability, being able to compile polyglot code bases. Probably also cmake, but compared to that, gradle looks as if it was designed by God itself, even though it severely lacks in ergonomics.
I would argue Buildkit is also trying to be this kind of tool but is significantly less mature.
That, and the fact that anything slightly out of the ordinary that you'd want to do with maven requires a plugin - or, since most people won't bother, just extra scripts on top of maven, or no automation at all.
And now they end up with what Ant was like.
Only the config step is “turing-complete”, which outputs a build graph that is cached and used to do every further step, finding the tasks that need recompilation, etc.
If config is a code, then it makes it more complicated in the long run (people are people and will add complexity to it) - there is a reason why they work on declarative syntax.