Currently, I can use "Find in Path" feature and type the name of the artifact (or search in the pom.xml) to check if the project has that dependency, but this doesn't work for transitive dependencies.
I can generate the dependency tree in IntelliJ (or on command line), but that requires me to lookup the artifact through the entire tree/list, not so convenient.
Is there an easy (more fluent) way of checking this?
Yes, just look in the project pane (left hand side).
Under the project structure you will see External Libraries - just expand this tree node and you will see all maven depepencies there. They start with Maven: - just type to search :)
For a proper analysis (showing the location of transitive deps) you can run mvn dependency:tree from the command line.