Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unless they look forward to manually approving gazillions of requests from stranded JCenter users in the next weeks. Maybe business is that good that they don't care about the overhead. Getting approved for a groupId took me literally 2 minutes. It's really not that complicated. Not sure yet about the process for actually getting releases approved, I'll see about that tomorrow.
Took me about half a week last time I tried this. That's from signing up to getting all the approvals needed and finally getting my jar out via maven central. I imagine they may have improved their processes a bit since then but as far as I know it still involves creating tickets in their issue tracker and a human doing stuff with it.
Sure, a human is still involved, but it’s definitely faster than anything else in the release process.
If there’d be something to improve, it’d be (a) having a built-in publish plugin in gradle with a publish.json that easily defines the variables and adds a super simple way to publish, and (b) automating the TXT verification akin to google-site-verification (plus potentially github oauth login to validate com.github namespaces).