No, gradle is fast in CICD settings as well where daemons are meaningless. It is fast because it has a proper graph model that only updates nodes that need to be updated, and can often do so in parallel.
I have fantastically lost my patience with Gradle builds that is why.
I bet if it wasn't for Android, no one would care about Gradle, Google is basically funding its existence.
There are hardly any talks about optmizing Maven builds, with Gradle on the other hand, not only it comes regularly, there is even tooling to track down build performance issues and regular conference talks on the matter.
