I enjoyed the article but I feel it overlooks one of the biggest reasons to use something like maven: It gives us the language to efficiently reason about and

I enjoyed the article but I feel it overlooks one of the biggest reasons to use something like maven: It gives us the language to efficiently reason about and discuss build concepts with colleagues. This is a big thing, think about the most recent new starter situation you experienced, about how communication of these common build tasks was expressed. Chances are if it was with a more composable tool, the discussions were fairly detailed, the words 'just like' frequently appeared. If it was with a more rigid tool, the conversation would have been in terms that tool commonly defines.