I'd say Maven is more than a dependency manager, though. It's a full build manager, with dependency management as one (major) feature. The dependency management part itself isn't very complicated, other than the verbosity of XML as the structure.
I have spent a long time as a Java dev using Maven, and the past few years floating around some other projects (C#, PHP, Python, a tiny bit of NodeJS) and continually find myself wishing to have Maven back, so I suppose YMMV.
Ironically though, every time I start a new project with maven, I end up needing to google how to actually build a runnable thing. I end up needing to configure some kind of maven plugin to build a fat jar.
I have spent a long time as a Java dev using Maven, and the past few years floating around some other projects (C#, PHP, Python, a tiny bit of NodeJS) and continually find myself wishing to have Maven back, so I suppose YMMV.