I guess it serves right to folks who endlessly hated Maven and liked this "new", "next generation" , "modern" build system with no XML. Turns out as long as JDK-8 is supported version of Java a lot of tools like this look modern.
Gradle does fix plenty of shortcomings of Maven, eg. proper parallel builds, proper task graph (you never have to do clean install on gradle, while it is almost always needed with maven), as well as it is much more performant.
