It's definitely gotten better over the past 5 or so years. But there was a lot of time spent acquiring technical debt over the preceding couple decades.
Even if I don't use Guava or Apache Commons myself, for example, I still occasionally run into dependency conflicts that I need to resolve with awful hacks like package relocation because so many other major libraries rely on one or the other, and neither library is a particularly great citizen about breaking changes.
Even if I don't use Guava or Apache Commons myself, for example, I still occasionally run into dependency conflicts that I need to resolve with awful hacks like package relocation because so many other major libraries rely on one or the other, and neither library is a particularly great citizen about breaking changes.