Gradle is absolute rubbish, definitely the worst experience I’ve had with a build system. But Maven is also rubbish.
IMO a CLI should be the primary way of interacting with the build system (see e.g. Go, Rust, JS with NPM or Yarn, Python with Poetry) and manually editing the build file should be reserved for edge cases and extensions.
Gradle is absolute rubbish, definitely the worst experience I’ve had with a build system. But Maven is also rubbish.
IMO a CLI should be the primary way of interacting with the build system (see e.g. Go, Rust, JS with NPM or Yarn, Python with Poetry) and manually editing the build file should be reserved for edge cases and extensions.