since .m2 already has a ton of living and even temp files (snapshots for ex which are still needed there quite often) then it doesn't hurt as much as it can sound to do it there, in particular with split repo it will be free and "by design"
Are you sure that the Maven process always has deletion rights in .m2, esp in container environments where .m2 is just injected from outsite to avoid downloading stuff over (and over and therefore also shared across multiple). So like having "r-x" on directory, but files have "rw-"?
