JavaFX to standalone application - didn't expect it to be hard. Pointers?

Hi all.

I'm hoping for a pointer to a current tutorial or document on something that I thought would be easy. Forgive me for venting a bit - it doesn't bother me when hard things are hard, but it bothers me when easy things are hard.

I'm an experienced software developer who has been away from the field for years (in management rather than development), and am now coming back as a hobby after having retired. New to Java, and thought a project I have underway, for a desktop application that needs to run both on Mac and Windows, would be a perfect match for this technology and a great learning opportunity. I selected IntelliJ as an IDE and it's been wonderful.

I may have made a mistake though. Based on my reading, I selected JavaFX (FXML) as the framework for the GUI. It has been quite easy to work with, after figuring out how to integrate it into an IntelliJ project. (Maybe the fact that that was complex should have been a warning sign.) I have the application working within the IDE. Java and JavaFX are not very different from platforms I know well (e.g. Swift) so it wasn't a difficult learning curve.

Here's the problem. I assumed that building the finished project as an executable for the Mac or Windows platform would be easy. Or, if not easy, at least not the hardest thing I've done.

I'm now at the end of a full week of failed experiments, reading documents, searching support groups, etc. I've set aside my target application, and am just trying to get a JavaFX/FXML "hello world" application to build to a standalone Mac executable.

I've found countless tutorials that don't work because they were developed before JavaFX support changed, or other reasons. I've tried a direct build, an Ant build, a Maven build. They all fail on broken pointers, obsolete library references, etc. I've tried IntelliJ, Eclipse, and Netbeans. In support forums, I've found many "you could try..." suggestions that don't work. I've found solutions based on tools, such as Oracle's AppBundler, that are no longer available. (I also found advice that "no one produces desktop applications any more", which is neither correct nor helpful.)

Did I make a mistake basing my system on JavaFX? Are people successfully producing Mac and Windows Desktop standalone applications with this platform? Now, in 2019? If not, what framework would have been a better choice?

If so, can anyone point to a current set of instructions or tutorial on what to configure and where to get the necessary parts to actually produce an executable for an application that uses FX and FXML?

Thanks for listening.
- Richard