I would agree except I find Maven to be easily the most sane and flexible and extensible build tool out there. I've used Maven to consistently build and deploy

I would agree except I find Maven to be easily the most sane and flexible and extensible build tool out there. I've used Maven to consistently build and deploy vast systems made up of hundreds of libraries. And this was ten years ago. Maven's only "flaw" is that it doesn't support incremental builds and, frankly, I've come to believe this isn't a flaw at all and incremental builds are an inherently unpredictable anti-pattern. (That might just be the Maven trauma speaking. There are tools out there like buck that claim to get incremental builds down perfectly but I have doubts and we've seen some strange bugs in buck builds.) What I find so strange is how the systems that came long after Maven -- particularly NPM and .NET -- that they could be so much worse than Maven. Somehow these people weren't aware of the importance of reproducible builds... despite that being a "thing" in Maven almost 20 years ago. Then, as noted above, you have go devs building off of git master branches. All of this suggests a real problem in software engineering. There's a distinct lack of knowledge sharing that does not lead to gradual, linear progress. It's quite disconcerting. Things are not getting better, every day, after all.