It's Bouncy Castle's particular situation. The Java build tools are totally fine with resolving thousands of version dependencies so everyone is happy. You can depend on A which in turn depends on B version 1.2 and also depend on C which depends on D which depends on E version 1.1 and you only end up with one version of B included, version 1.2. Java execution environments also support all kinds of classloader isolation so you have multiple versions of the same jar and classes, all in the same JVM, only visible to the components that wanted to see them, so there's no clash.

But Bouncy Castle - and almost nothing else - adds another dimension across its artifact names. This is not standard! You now have to watch your dependency trees like a hawk to see that some other artifact doesn't bring in <artifactId>bcprov-jdk14</artifactId> to fuck with your <artifactId>bcprov-jdk18on</artifactId>, and if they do, you need to slap an <exclusion> on that dependency's dependency.

The reason Bouncy Castle does this is because it chooses to support some very old versions of Java, that predate JDK 9 introducing multi-release jars (https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/21/docs/specs/jar/jar...) which removed the need for different named jars for different JDKs (...but only from JDK 9 onwards)

So, in general, the Java tools have this solved, unless you're Bouncy Castle.