Maven is a classic contextual tool: it is opinionated, rigid, generic, and dogmatic, which is exactly what is needed at the beginning of a project. Before anything exists, it’s nice for something to impose a structure, and to make it trivial to add behavior via plug-ins and other pre-built niceties. But over time, the project becomes less generic and more like a real, messy project. Early on, when no one knows enough to have opinions about things like lifecycle, a rigid system is good. Over time, though, project complexity requires developers to spawn opinions, and tools like Maven don’t care.