It's so true. I used Ant > Maven > Gradle. The thing that I think is different about modern CI is there's no good, standard way of adding functionality. So it's almost never write a plugin and always hack something together. And none of it's portable between build systems which are (almost) all SaaS, so it's like getting the absolute worst of everything.
I'll be absolutely shocked if current CI builds still work in 10 years.
This is kind of why I like keeping them as dumb as possible. Let each of your repos contain a ./build ./test ./run and the ci does stuff based on those assumptions...
You're switching from rpms->k8s? Actually nothing has to change per repo for this.
Also it creates a nice standard that is easily enforced by your deployment pipelines: no ./run? Then it's undeployable. kthxbye etc..
This becomes important when you have >50 services.
I'll be absolutely shocked if current CI builds still work in 10 years.