I am curious if it was actually 3000, or if that is embellished. I've been in about 6 java shops from Nike to startups, and the number is USUALLY around 100.
The reason is really simple - Jar files used to be required to download manually to add as a dependency. So there was a history of about 15 years of doing it the hard way. After maven was introduced, it took a while before OSS libs started adding other libs. Most of the time OSS libs are just including other Jars from their own organization.
It's possibly an embellished number, I cannot remember the actual number but it was significantly larger than 100. I seem to have remembered it as 3000. The project had many frameworks: spring, glassfish, camel among others.
Gotcha, I'm guessing 300 range. That is quite a bit for Java actually - so still counts as pretty bad. Contextually here's a fairly complicated program in our current stack (which is all JS), the node_modules folder has 722 dependencies in it right now. Edit: I was replying to your first edition of the reply. If it's truly 3000 that's quite insane. That being said, the projects with a few hundred would have Glassfish, CXF, Spring, etc...
The reason is really simple - Jar files used to be required to download manually to add as a dependency. So there was a history of about 15 years of doing it the hard way. After maven was introduced, it took a while before OSS libs started adding other libs. Most of the time OSS libs are just including other Jars from their own organization.