Last time I tried to use the official Apache Parquet Java library, parsing "normal" Parquet files depended on parquet-avro because the library used Avro's GenericRecord class to represent rows from Parquet files with arbitrary schemas. So this problem would presumably affect any kind of Parquet parsing, even if there is absolutely no Avro actually involved.

(Yes, this doesn't make sense; the official Parquet Java library had some of the worst code design I've had the misfortune to depend on.)