While Gradle sucks and is complex af I really do like multi-module stuff. We can flesh out components that are intertwined, test them separately and things like that. So if you have a big backend that wouldn't make sense as microservices it really do helps. I haven't seen any other build tools that allow me to build multi-module stuff. Anyone?
Maven? I've worked on quite a few large backend projects using multi-module in Maven, after it's setup it works: parent POM, submodules, dependency management on parent POM.
It depends on what features specifically you are looking for though.
XML is just verbose, after that it's pretty simple. It's all declarative, there's no code execution during build time that you have to keep in mind to build a mental model of what is actually executing, you read the XML, check the steps and configurations and can understand completely what's being executed.
I like Kotlin, I don't like build tools that allow general computing during runtime where I will have to debug build code to understand what exactly has failed. Declarative tools are much better to reason about for most infrastructure tasks.
