> Deployment of Java applications continues to be a mess
If it could help you, we're using JIB. We're on Scala and so we're using sbt-jib. Zero issues, works like a charm, deployment (on k8s) is just not a problem for us. But I would expect that it should work well for Java too.
On a related note.. The JDK developers could learn a thing or two from Scala, which comes with the really handy scala-cli. The JDK should have something similar.