When you lead with "XML is bad", I feel you're missing the wood for the trees.

What I really like about Maven is that the build file is declarative.

Now, would it be better in JSON or YAML? That's really a matter of taste.

Also, Maven artifact repositories have one massive feature that everyone else omits for reasons I can't fathom - verified package namespaces, so no typosquatting here.

I disagree. I’m not saying Maven is perfect but I find the way it does builds and dependencies FAR preferable to what C++ or JS have.

Java is a great language with a terrible ecosystem. Why is it so awful, and what can be done about it?