Gradle suffers the same issue I had with Ruby codebases some 10-12 years ago: people want to be clever, the tooling is very powerful, people use the powerful fe

Gradle suffers the same issue I had with Ruby codebases some 10-12 years ago: people want to be clever, the tooling is very powerful, people use the powerful features to create idiosyncratic tricks: auto-loaders, reconfigurations, and a multitude of action-at-a-distance clever tricks which are inscrutable after it gets large enough. The ergonomics of Gradle allows to create monstrosities that are extremely hard to reason about later. I've lost countless hours in previous jobs using Gradle where someone at some point of the project tried to engineer the build system as an application, an application that is hard to read, reason about and actually know what it is doing. Build scripts should be declarative, simple to read and follow. Not a plethora of imports and reconfigurations happening under the hood creating a massive cognitive load to simply understand how the fuck a JAR is built.