A general purpose language as the basis for a build tool always felt like a sledgehammer/nail situation to me. Personally, I prefer less concise, less flexible build config tooling.
Agreed, and I think the same applies in multiple other domains. A general purpose language for CI/CD configuration (Groovy), Infrastructure as Code (Pulumi) is just giving you enough flexibility to shoot yourself in the foot while making reusability and readability much more of a problem than it needs to be. I hate YAML for anything more complex than a flat configuration file but I'd take it over Groovy any day.