I'd agree that a lot of the SMB/large enterprise software devleopment practices make trivial domain requirements into extremely complicated distributed monolith

I'd agree that a lot of the SMB/large enterprise software devleopment practices make trivial domain requirements into extremely complicated distributed monoliths colloquially called "microsrevices", but gradle is a pretty bad example for this kind of behaviour. gradle was created as a kneejerk reaction to maven forcing build configuration to be set in stone and in xml. Its inspired by dynamic scripting languages, which is as far removed from these companies as you can get. I remember it being created shortly after groovy became massively overhyped, and I think the only tools still using it are gradle and Jenkins...