The process is also not difficult for individual developers. Most of the steps to publish on Maven Central have to be done only once and there is good documentation about how to do it. Meeting some minimum requirements, such as proving namespace ownership or defining a license, improves the quality of a public artifact repository significantly. Who wants to use artifacts from a repository where everyone can just dump their stuff whithout any checks? Or who wants to use software that is based on such dependencies? Although Maven Central is not a perfect place either, you can at least be sure that the artifacts there meet some basic requirements.