Whilst that is ridiculous if they're bringing in a new dependency, if I squint I can see the thought process. Transitive dependencies are far harder to be certain about. It took a few seconds to scan our company's entire code base for log4j2.

But there's no easy way to verify that none of them might depend on, say, Spring Boot Web Starter, which brings in umpteen other dependencies.

Sure, you can resolve dependencies in each project and check at the individual level that the resolved dependencies for runtime don't include log4j2 but it's much more onerous. And you can take away that risk by declaring it in your parent POM so the version is fixed, regardless of what transitive deps may use.

Of course, I would always say if this what was being done, using the dependencyManagement would be a better solution. But a lot of this work will be under duress and in my experience the majority of people using systems like Maven don't really understand it.