This! Leiningen is Maven for Clojure and tools.deps is Ant, for those who used them in Java-land. tools.deps can't build your project without a separate library called tools.build, just like Ant can't pull down dependencies without Ivy.

Maven (like Leiningen) bundles all of that in a single tool, plus adds tons of more options. On top of that, you have a plugin for almost anything.