The tooling around gRPC with bazel when using python is so bad it’s almost impossible to work with, which is hilarious considering they both come from Google. Then I had additional problems getting it to work with Ruby. Then I had more problems getting it to work in k8s, because of load balancing with http/2. Combine those issues with a number of other problems I ran into with gRPC, and I ended up just building a small JSON-RPC implementation that fit our needs perfectly.
I'm firmly in the Maven is better than Gradle camp. Yes, it's less flexible, that's why I like it.
Gradle might be better if it wasn't a poorly documented Groovy/Kotlin DSL where everything is a closure, but I do like the fact that if you want to do something in Maven you need a plugin that couples to known points in the lifecycle. It makes it explicit what is doing what and where.
And fully agree on the incredible pain of Gradle upgrades.
No, it's still horrible, we just don't understand why because some other team maintains it. We just suffer the long build times by killing time on memegen or visiting the MK.
