also fwiw, while xml is kind of not very pretty, for most dependencies, you literally google "mydependency maven", click the first link, click the version you w

also fwiw, while xml is kind of not very pretty, for most dependencies, you literally google "mydependency maven", click the first link, click the version you want, then literally just copy/paste the XML into your pom.xml. Is it as slick as 1 command? No. But it's certainly not rocket science, and most libraries github readmes even provide you the maven <dependency /> blob, so it's not usually confusing imo. And also, I do want to point out that "just npm -i mything" comes with problems like typosquatting, which is a lot less common in java afaik.