No, you do not have to use
Ant or Maven to build a webapp, although Eclipse isn't going to do a very good job without some sort of additional build tool, since Eclipse has fairly simple build rules coded into it and WARs are more complex.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.