I'd really prefer to avoid setting a precedent for adding in 3rd party plugins into various profiles into the apache parent POM. It seems like there'd be no end to it. There's lots of plugins that are useful, or potentially useful, but aren't included in the parent POM... but that doesn't mean they all should be. I myself help maintain a Java code formatter plugin and an import sort order plugin, among a few others, that are quite useful, but I don't think should be included in the Apache parent POM. The line has to be drawn somewhere in order to avoid bloat. I'd prefer to leave this one out. It's easy enough to add this profile to one's own ~/.m2/settings.xml or to a project's parent POM instead.

I also don't don't think it will be particularly useful to add it to the parent POM, especially since doing so makes it difficult to override a lot of its configuration in order to customize anything and for this plugin, it's quite common to customize it's settings, and not all of its options can be customized with properties. So, adding it here won't actually save any time or effort for many of the people who really depend on this plugin.

Also, the proposed profile name is also generic enough that it could collide with others and from what I've seen, the people who care about this report are people who have already added it to their POM.

On a personal note, jacoco is the only plugin I've removed from projects (because it was broken, usually) where not a single developer has noticed for years.... it's useful in theory, but from what I can tell, almost no developer pays attention to its reports or even notices when they are missing. Maybe that's an argument for making it more ubiquitous, to encourage more developers to consider testing coverage and code quality (testability), but I think there's also a reasonable argument that it's utility is low enough that it doesn't make for a good candidate for the apache parent POM.