The printing is still useful for some of these

When the preceding build step already fails having clean install then the subsequent steps will not be executed.

In particular since they attach it to the action result which can be easier to read than logs?

Do you mean the workflow summary? The python scripts wrote to them.

While I understand the concern that mvn log is difficult to handle, currently any metric >0 will not be tolerated. Ideally the tables will always have 0,0,0,0,0,... values.
Therefore I'm not sure what benefit such table brings, beyond much better format. The information itself remains the same.

Agreed, we could add a failure() conditional to the printing, but if the mvn output is readable enough, it's not needed.