Maven is trash, sorry. It can't even perform incremental compilation reliably, plugins download dependencies at execution time (making caching dependencies on CI a pain), the dependency resolution mechanism in the case of conflicting dependencies seems... random? [0], and so on. Gradle seems marginally better (and more modern), but it's also somehow overcomplex and easy to create a mess.

I can fault Ruby for many things, but Bundler is easy to use and just works (except in the case of C bindings, but I don't think that's in the scope of Bundler to fix), and from what I hear, cargo should be similar.

[0] Although this is also an ecosystem problem; in e.g. Ruby, libraries specify version ranges for subdependencies, and then Bundler will try to resolve all version ranges, and report an error if there's no way to resolve it. Usually, this works quite well. A Java library A will just specify a particular version of library B, you have no guarantee that the version of B that you get when you add A to your build is the same one. There are various solutions to this, such as BOMs, but if the library you use isn't in a BOM, you're out of luck. In any case, this is not a theoretical problem, I've spent countless hours trying to debug problems with conflicting dependency versions causing errors at runtime because certain classes or methods didn't exist.