but what about all the cases where you don't even need additional plugins, only the base functionality (these are my dependencies, these are my compiler options, ...). It's been like 1-2 years at this point since I looked into Kobalt, but I remember that I checked your configuration of JCommander(? or similar) and another project and I couldn't deduce the subset of stuff that I need for a new project (let's call it "hello-world-with-Sping").
So the takeaway is, maybe instead of showcasing how you configured your cool but advanced projects, show how to setup a new project with the most often used dependencies (extra points if you get a basic version of
start.spring.io/ running). But I'm not looking into Kobalt currently and you haven't looked into it for 2-3 years, but I think this is what I needed (together with a working IntelliJ plugin, it wasn't buggy, it didn't even load/install) when I did look into Kobalt.
It's probably a chicken-and-egg problem, if Kobalt had become more popular, someone would have worked over the documentation and made it easier to on-board eventually.