But you need to edit the Gradle configuration files. Most people simply cargo-cult that, and while that works most of the time, it's incredibly non-intuitive to solve problems.
99% of the time this is just pasting one dependency line into a file, and a Gradle file reads more intuitively than a Maven pom file. IMO performance aside Maven really only excels in edge cases. Most projects would never see any advantages from using Maven instead.
Honestly, I find Maven more intuitive. Gradle is too flexible, you can have dozens of way to perform one task. With maven, you often search for one plugin that does what you want and stick with that. Of course, if there's no existing plugin that fit you, then it gets much more complicated, but that case is usually rare due to maven's massive number of plugins.
You can use Kotlin instead of Apache Groovy as the build language for Gradle, but virtually no-one uses it there.