Merely as a "for your consideration," GitLab ships with its own Maven repository (along with npm, docker, Nuget, and a bazillion others)[1] so you have total sovereignty over the publishing auth story. I can appreciate going with Central can be a DX win if you're distributing a library, since having folks add <repository> lines to their pom.xml or settings.xml is a hassle, but at least you get to decide which hassle you prefer :-D

In fairness, GitHub also finally got on board the train, too: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/use-cases-and-examples/pu...

1: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/packages/maven_repository/