Ya know, I've directed a lot of criticism at Maven over the years... and most of it well-founded, I believe, even in hindsight. And yet, today, I find that of all the Java build tools, Maven is my preferred one. Part of that is me, normalizing the pain of Maven in some regards, and part of that is places where they have improved the tool. But however you break it down, it is indeed the case that for the most part Maven "just works"™. That is, at least for Java. I don't do a lot of Scala or Kotlin or anything, so no comment there. And for Groovy, I'm usually doing Grails projects which default to Gradle, so I tend to use Gradle in that context. But for plain Java projects, I honestly find Maven to be the path of least resistance.