[Tainnor]

> Just about any (Java) build tool supports incremental compilation

I wish that were true. Maven is terrible at this, e.g. here's a bug report that's been open for 12 years: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MCOMPILER-209

Even just doing things like "please predownload any dependencies in this one job and cache them, so they can be reused in these 5 other jobs" don't work reliably with maven because certain plugins like surefire download dependencies on the fly.

> Nor everyone is building Google sized monorepos.

Nor is everyone building "small-ish codebases". You don't have to be Google, I worked at a company with maybe 10 developers in total, but the codebase was over 10 years old and had a gazillion features (plus a lot of tech debt, obviously) and the build times were atrocious. It wasn't all maven's fault, of course (we had really badly written tests, for example), but the broken incremental compilation easily added 5-10 more minutes to each build.