Yes. In the example of gradle I setup all specifics to the well know lifecycle tasks: check, assemble and in some cases publish. Some projects are more complicated specifically when you can really use the rule of: 1 project one assembly. See android with apk vs bundle. Here you may need more specific tasks. But I try to bind CI (be it Jenkins or GitHub actions) to only know the basic interface. But I meant specifically the believe that build systems and tooling around is too complicated and unnecessary.

Ah yes. Unfortunately the complexity is necessary in modern codebases. There are usually ways to simplify, but only to a point - after that all you're doing is smearing the complexity around rather than containing it.