IntelliJ is far and away above any other IDE and is well worth the paid license imho. It's a professional tool written by and for professionals. VSCode and Eclipse have some inertia in very particular workflows/tools and a few different (valid) ways of operating, but nothing is as polished and cohesive as the JetBrains.

Gradle, however, is a dumpster-fire of footguns and obtuse and non-debug-able DSLs.

gradle lets you get something custom working quickly, because it's basically a script with code you want to execute.

For small projects, it works fine, as long as the complexity doesn't grow beyond a certain point for the small project (aka, doesn't grow to a big project), and is maintained by the same person.

For a large project, i do not like gradle at all. Maven is a much better build tool, since standardization is the best thing since sliced bread.