I feel that transitive dependency is convenient, but that's what makes your application fat.

Moreover, many of those transitive dependencies aren't actually needed (they might be needed for some obscure feature that you don't use). Good libraries might declare those dependencies as optional, but not always.

And almost all dependency conflicts arise from multi-level transitive dependency problems.

May be it's better to just instruct user which transitive dependencies he has to install and let him do the job.

I, myself, miss dumb simple java build tool which would to the very minimum of job. I'm happy to assist it when necessary. Maven is nightmare and Gradle is hell of a nightmare. I don't need that complexity for my projects but I have to pay the price. I often think to downgrade to Makefile or shell script.