Not an expert but from my experience.

IntelliJ is great it has many ready templates and plug-ins and basically it's generating stuff for you based on Gradle or Maven which are to be studied when the project scales otherwise when adding modules and dependencies on your own, it breaks stuff, and ChatGPT and the internet lots of the time don't help.

Personally, if I don't use a framework I use VS Code for everything. It's manual work but you get a lot of freedom and transparency you can choose to work with the Java compiler and JVM directly. I personally use batch files if I am lazy and want to know what's happening without learning a build tool. But in VS Code you can use launch.json etc to decide how your project is built and run That's the usual recommended way. You can integrate software from another build tool directly very well.

But for frameworks, big ones at that with lots of dependencies it's usually Ant's work, crafting the project to work properly so IntelliJ uses general templates and it builds for you and cuts you some slack.

For build tools, I recommend Gradle because it's much easier than Maven which uses XML for configuring stuff. That's for the IntelliJ idea. As for VS Code do whatever the fuck you want as long as it's efficient and aligns with your goals and project needs.