I think this is an often overlooked solution to some of the problems we nowadays tend to approach the clown for.
As for build systems, Maven is old and cranky but if something else replaces it, it will probably be quite similar anyway.
unsure re Maven, 4.0.0 has been around the corner for years, but I think there is space for a modern alternative that is JPMS first, supports semantic versioning (i.e. tilde/carat notation) with lockfiles, and doesn't require a bunch of plugins out of the box for common use-cases. Maybe Mill (https://mill-build.org) - i've yet to try it.
XML is nice, if your pom.xml is massive, just suck it in through JAXB and program against it, perhaps render it to a web page. XSLT can also be helpful. We're not supposed to look at XML as plain text.
Bazel is the most obvious contender and very different from Maven in almost every possible way.
Switching out Maven for a larger maintenance burden might be reasonable in a large organisation that is swimming in competent employees, but most do not.
As for obvious contender, I'd say that would be Gradle, which is harder to get someone started with than Maven and due to the DSL allows you to invent weirder footguns.
Currently I’m trying to externalize as much as possible to the service mesh. I want teams to stand up a basic unencrypted HTTP server that accepts the company headers and just works with as minimal of a runtime as possible.
The Java (now Jakarta) EE standard on top is a good base for third party implementations to "speak a common language", e.g. it's not that hard to move between Quarkus/spring/micronaut etc, even if not all support the actual standard.
Eventually though, I found Elixir and it gave me everything I was looking for from that stack.