Perhaps my biggest critique is that crates.io has no namespacing. Anyone can just claim a global and generic package name and we mostly have to deal with it (unless you avoid using the crates.io repository, but then you'll probably have more problems...). Some of these globally-claimed generic packages are not really the best package to use.
Maybe it was a reaction against the Java-style reverse DNS notation, which is verbose and annoying, but a more GitHub-style user/group namespace prefixing package names would have been the nice middle ground.
Maven and Java really don’t get enough credit for how well it’s dependency management works.
So many inferior dependency management systems for other languages have come along later, and learned nothing from those that came before it.
Is this a joke?
Having tried Java and other languages, no, it's not a joke. Other than XML Maven got a lot of things right.
And you don't even need to use XML with Polyglot Maven