[gottorf]

Ant and Maven have existed for a long time, but for me they didn't prevent Java (and other JVM language) projects from suffering significant bitrot in the build process.

For example, I worked on a project that just stopped being able to be built with Maven one day, with no changes to the JVM version, any of the dependencies, or the Maven version itself. After a while I gave up trying to figure it out, because the same project was able to be built with Gradle!

Older Scala projects were a pain in the ass to build because the Typesafe repositories stopped accepting plain HTTP connections, requiring obscure configuration changes to sbt. I've never had to deal with things like that in the world of Go.