I saw the kts gradle presentation at kotlinconf and my reaction was: “Well, it’s better than the old groovy config, and i guess they had to keep the migration path easy. But, it’s still not as simple as Kobalt”.
Unfortunately, build tools are unglamorous and benefit from having a larger community. Jetbrains probably felt they needed to be part of the gradle world in order to seem more mainstream. But, i bet they could have made a better developer experience if they had gone with something simpler, like Kobalt.