Right now, things are pretty good. But this is surprisingly recent. Gradle and Maven have both been good at managing dependency versions for a long time. Gradle has also been good at managing the Gradle version, via the wrapper, for a long time; Maven has equivalent wrapper now, but it's quite new, and support in the wider ecosystem is patchy (eg a TeamCity Maven build step can't use a wrapper, i don't think). Meanwhile, there is no standard way to manage JDK versions; there are SDKMAN! and asdf, and they work fine, but they aren't de facto standards. Gradle lets you specify the JDK version to build with via toolchains, but this is quite new (6.7 in 2020). I have no idea if Maven has an equivalent.
While what you say is true, the point about the JDK versions is mitigated a bit by the fact many things are backwards compatible. Although yes, if you jump from 8 to 17, you're going to run into some problems.
I'm not a huge fan of the gradle toolchain tool (I don't think gradle should be managing my JDKs and I would prefer if it could instead just fail the build if you use the wrong JDK version), but I do understand why it exists.
