> I've never used maven so I don't know if it is better or worse

It's about the same for packages with a native component. Local build tools are still needed.

Java stuff is slightly less likely to have a compiled component in the first place, in my entirely subjective impression. Maybe that's because of convention, or performance; I don't know. But when a compiled dependency does exist, and nobody included a prebuilt chunk of binary for your architecture in the jar, a build is needed in roughly an equivalent fashion to what pip (or npm, cpan(1), etc.) do.