Maven is not a really like any of the other build systems. I would say most build systems are glorified Make. Maven is not.
SBT, Gradle, and even old school Ant seem far less verbose than Maven but Maven really shines when you have hundreds of projects in an organization. You can get extreme consistency.
You don't have to have everything checked in one gigantic source tree which makes open sourcing projects subsets of your code base easier. Yeah Gradle and SBT can sort of do this but not nearly as decoupled as Maven does it (generally with Gradle and SBT you have to do some path magic).
Just about every PL and editor can readily edit Maven pom files. That means with out loosing comments or spaces you can have scripts go and rewrite hundreds of pom files or even just do a sanity check to make sure that they are consistent.
This is the complete opposite with build systems where basically the build system is turing complete scripting language. Projects have major drift and you loose lots of consistency.