In the Java world there is also the debate between Maven (more declarative) and Gradle (less declarative, but also tries to pass as declarative), and the same c

In the Java world there is also the debate between Maven (more declarative) and Gradle (less declarative, but also tries to pass as declarative), and the same conclusion is always reached: Maven make it very difficult to do complex things, therefore Maven builds tend to be very simple (sometimes lacking obvious features because of that) while Gradle projects tend to become utterly complex as it's just easy to use Groovy or Kotlin to create whatever mess you need the build to do... my argument to defend Gradle when this is pointed out is that if the build is doing intrinsically complex things, having a proper language to manage that complexity is the only sensible solution: people writing these builds are professional developers, if they can't keep complexity under control using a fully featured programming language, then they are just not very good professionals.