Maven doesn't require an IDE and uses a convention over configuration based approach where it will run against the public repo with zero config.
Moreover, it's significantly 'more fluid' due to the ability to ship assembled fat binaries that have all of their dependencies packaged with them. No need to worry about which version of what is installed on this machine.
> No need to worry about which version of what is installed on this machine.
That's not a concern when using NPM (out of the box), and when using virtualenv it's not a concern when using pip (which most Python devs do).
Are you saying that when developing in Node, you don't have to interact with npm or other build & deployment utilities? End-users of packaged Java applications don't have to interact with Maven any more than end users of packaged C applications have to interact with Make.
Thus :
> the fact remains that it [pom.xml] exists and most developers will have to interact with it at some point or another. That's simply not the case in many other systems.
Again, I would like to highlight that this entire discussion should be viewed through the lens of friction vs. frictionless tools, and what that means for community adoption.