Having a SNAPSHOT release channel allows a CI pipeline to quickly identify potential breaking changes and new features before the release is published. Most OSS project I have seen have snapshot releases channel. What I've seen work well is to always have maven version explicit in the poms and manage version upgrade with the mvn release plugin as part of the release process. When a release is cut, snapshot is moved to a final version, tag is done on git, build is published to maven, then main branch is updated with the new version snapshot.