You don't have to reimport manually each time. You can enable auto-import as documented here. Change this in Settings -> Maven -> Import Maven projects automatically.
Apart from checking 'Import Maven projects automatically', make sure that settings.xml file from File > Settings > Maven > User Settings file exist, If doesn't exist then override and provide your settings.xml file path.
For some reason IntelliJ (at least in version 2019.1.2) ignores dependencies in local .m2 directory. None of above solutions worked for me. The only thing finally forced IntelliJ to discover local dependencies was:
Close project
Open project clicking on pom.xml (not on a project directory)
I tried absolutely everything to get IntelliJ to pickup my pom.xml changes but it just wasn't doing it. I commented out all of the <dependencies> in pom.xml and rebuilt the project which should've shown hundreds of compile errors but didn't.
In the end, I had to delete the .idea folder to get IntelliJ to regenerate it's maven model. Once I did this, subsequent changes to pom.xml were picked up when I did a "Reload All Projects" so I suspect a bug where IntelliJ is using a cached model rather than updating it when changes are made.
Here's what I did:
Close the project in IntelliJ (file -> close project)
Delete the .idea folder in the root folder of the project