[phillord]

It doesn't force anything though, unless you statically refer to the runtime. It does force you to exclude their logging backend, but that is straight-forward enough.

[theanomaly]

Yes, but you have to know to exclude their backend. And, that library may be several dependencies deep. Now you're expecting potentially junior developers to have the insight to grep their entire transitive dependency tree, find the nop dep, and exclude it. This kind of silent failure is worse than the alternative.

[duaneb]

Dependency exclusions is a code smell everywhere but java. I don't understand why someone is actively giving this advice.

[phillord2]

The alternative is not specifying a nop dependencies and then inflicting on downstream uses the choice that I was not prepared to make.