Gradle is a better build tool from a purely architectural point of view (though it is quite disliked, I believe mostly due to the ultra-complex android build system being built on top and giving it a bad name), but the Maven repo system is absolutely better than most contemporary repositories, proved by its comparably rare side-chain attacks.
It's not like the kotlin DSL comes without problems. Configuration time is most of the time about doubled compared to Groovy, type hinting and completion often end up being slower _and_ worse than Groovy, and if you're lucky, your IDE suddenly can't find a random extension in your classpath and your entire build.gradle.kts or plugin becomes a red, squiggly mess.
Unfortunately, Gradle is the best build tool I've used for complex systems. And it still fucking sucks.
I dislike it because of the ultra-complex build system that over-ambitious devops engineers ended up building in my shop. Our build system was the hardest part of our code base to reason about, which is pretty screwed up.
Well, that’s on them — were they developers in any language they could have also made a mess there. I have seen my fair share of random custom maven plugins as well, which have more bugs than features.
