Maven – Release Notes - Maven 3.2.1 (apache.org)
Transitive dependency excludes (MNG-2315)
It is sometimes useful to clip a dependency's transitive dependencies. A dependency may have incorrectly specified scopes, or dependencies that conflict with other dependencies in your project. Using wildcard(通配符) excludes makes it easy to exclude all a dependency's transitive dependencies. In the case below you may be working with the maven-embedder and you want to manage the dependencies you use yourself, so you clip all the transitive dependencies:
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 https://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
...
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.maven</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-embedder</artifactId>
<version>3.1.0</version>
<exclusions>
<exclusion>
<groupId>*</groupId>
<artifactId>*</artifactId>
</exclusion>
</exclusions>
</dependency>
...
</dependencies>
...
</project>