I can agree with most of that, but my point wasn’t that you should be “tinkering” with your build file, but that as time goes on and your project grows and your team grows you should be making improvements. No active project sits still, and having a tool like maven that is incredibly rigid and hard to use and modify makes that growth incredibly painful.
For example, you can easily start with gradle with just a few lines. You don’t need to worry about plugins, extra tasks, etc. Then as your project grows you can add in things like mutation testing, integration testing, plugins to share your configuration between all your projects. This growth is incredibly easy with a build tool that uses a DSL rather than one that is purely descriptive.
Yes, it’s massive pain if you pick up someone’s project and they’ve made a mess of things. But if you actually work with competent people this generally isn’t a problem. And it shouldn’t be a problem if you’re using open source projects that have a decent number of users.