I've had the misfortune of having Maven forced on me for Scala projects, I just can't agree with you. The overhead of starting the compiler so often is a killer, and makes your builds much slower. Unless there's been some improvement of Zinc/Bloop/Etc with Maven since I've used it.

I think I would prefer to use Mill than Maven (I haven't used Mill myself) ... going through the video tutorial, it's clear that it's also a very simple system without some of the ancient baggage of Maven (xml, too many plugins, etc).