Programming languages come with their own niches, tools, culture, and history. Gradle has lots of verbosity, complexity, and so on. It’s a build system and a dependency manager in one. Other languages separate these duties.

A cultural preference for tools written in specific languages or available for specific platforms exists as well. Lots of C/C++ programmers dislike everything Java. They will cite performance and philosophy. They ask why should they install and manage JVM versions and installs for a task they can do with a make file, a shell script, and Conan/vcpkg.

Not even all Java folks use gradle. maven and ant ant are still around and I’ve seen someone write Java build tasks using rake.