I agree, in principle. The issue is that as the number of dependencies (and, in particular, transitive dependencies) grows, fat jars become less and less wieldy

I agree, in principle. The issue is that as the number of dependencies (and, in particular, transitive dependencies) grows, fat jars become less and less wieldy. Our uberjars are in the 150-200MB range, which means they take up a lot of space (we produce and store artifacts from every merge to master) and take a while to build and deploy.