Yes, but Maven doesn't support reproducibility (outside of plugins that basically haul in a lockfile). So his whole point is moot (Gradle now does, as an aside: https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/dependency_locking...)

Again - I don't think the author is aware enough of the problem space to be making the sort of claim that he is. He doesn't understand the problem lockfiles are solving, so he doesn't know why they exist and wants them gone... chesterton's fence in action.

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Directly declaring deps is great. It's so great that we'd like to do it for every dependency in many (arguably most) cases. But doing that really sort of sucks when you start getting into even low 10s of deps. Enter... lockfiles and the tooling to auto-resolve them.