I use, and have used for very many years, Module::Starter to create every single distribution I write. I know that Dist::Zilla is very actively maintained, but I use ExtUtils::MakeMaker for building instead, so I can't really comment on it specifically.

From what I can tell on a cursory basis, Dist::Zilla will generate ExtUtils::MakeMaker code or Module::Build code, the two are not necessarily mutex. I just it just depends on how "meta" I want to get.