IMO it's good to have a "shadow backlog" for stuff like this. Keep the actual backlog for prioritised product work, "ideas" and tech debt can be kept in GitHub Issues or even just a wiki page somewhere.
Gradle is absolute rubbish, definitely the worst experience I've had with a build system. But Maven is also rubbish.
IMO a CLI should be the primary way of interacting with the build system (see e.g. Go, Rust, JS with NPM or Yarn, Python with Poetry) and manually editing the build file should be reserved for edge cases and extensions.
I don't know if there's any "evidence" but it's well known that the devs of Lemmy are Marxist-Leninists, and that's the reason for many choosing to use Lemmy.
No, the queens are all wallflowers, why do you think they aren't dancing?? I'll tell you, they're too shy.