I have to say that in my whole career of doing Java / Clojure, Google’s SDK are one of the worst in terms of dependency hell. It’s incredibly unpleasant to work with, lots of breaking incompatibilities with libraries, etcetera.

I may sound very snarky, but it really feels like an over engineered mess and I suspect the reason they need all these dependency tricks is the fact that it’s over engineered, not necessarily that the problem they’re solving is so unique that they need circular dependencies.