Actually, I like Maven. It's perfect for code that is broken into medium-sized projects, which makes it great for service-oriented architectures (would have said microservices here instead, but think we're learning that breaking our services too finely down is generally not a good idea).

Yeah, it seems like Maven is designed to build just one project with relatively little build-code (although, figuring out versioning of the libs used in your build can get tricky, but guessing this is how it is in most languages). It's still one of my favorites build tools for many situations.

I've been using maven for 20+ years, gradle for 10? ant for 5 before that. sbt for 15. I've written custom plugins for all of them. I know them quite well, unfortunately.

I use LLMs to maintain them now. I keep the build files simple. It was an inconvenience before, but a trifle now.

LOL I wish. LLMs massacre gradle code all the time. Once you're past boilerplate generation and doing anything remotely unusual they can't stop hallucinating broken shit that they insist works.