As a person that also works in maintaining pipelines of multiple projects and having used technologies like npm, yarn, maven, gradle, pip and make.
sbt is by far the simplest and easiest one to use of all of them.
(I do wonder how good cargo is based on what everyone says)
Sure, it has its rough corners and sometimes you have to apply some black magic spell found in the internet that nobody understands but \shrug
I do belive sbt could be improved but I also think it has done a lot over the years.
I am also pretty positive that for most common and basic usages it works as expected and has a smooth learning curve, check: sbt Reference Manual — sbt by example