I think any complicated build system will eventually devolve regardless of the build tool if it's not properly maintained; the variability of the required tasks is just too high.
Gradle does seem to be moving fast with regards to Java support in general changes and improvements in the build tool. It takes effort to keep up, but it's worthwhile.
But isn't the key job of a build system to 'just work'.
Ie it's executable documentation of how to build/test the software.
ie really shouldn't need constant maintenance, especially if the code hasn't changed.
We are a large enterprise shop with many projects being built on different machines, architectures, technologies, etc. We took the time to become decent in Gradle, and it works great for us.
Absolute majority of people I witnessed using Gradle (myself including) approached it with almost religious terror. Making a change - any change - is akin to playing Russian Roulette, except all chambers but one are loaded. Change one directive - and your build breaks in most weird and incomprehensible ways.
And then there is the whole notion of stability (I mean "contract stability.") Almost every single release of Gradle breaks things in some subtle ways. I can take a project from the olden UNIX days with its Makefile and that Makefile will work in gmake in the freshest Linux distro, using gmake release that was produced multiple decades after Stu Feldman's make. It doesn't require a very specific version of libc or kernel. Because it is 1. Written portably and 2. It treats its behavior (jokes about using the Tab character aside) as a contract and it doesn't violate it just because some poorly educated software engineer decided that it would be a good idea to change the behavior in the upcoming release.
What I hated most about Gradle is that groovy is untyped. You'd make a change and wait for your build to complete only to find out minutes later that you made a typo or some other innocuous mistake. Glad they introduced Kotlin DSL.
I didn't notice the breaking changes much when we heavily used gradle. Gradle also comes with gradlew, which bootstraps your gradle project with the exact gradle version that is needed to build that project, so you can take an old gradle project and build it regardless of all those breaking changes that you mention.
I have an unreasonable hatred of gradle and its imperative, choose-your-own-language build files, every buildfile being structured differently.
Hateful.
Not even talking about how slow it is, no I don't want the garbage demon running somewhere.
