maven-metadata.xml files are not removed, causing slowness when fetching them

We ran into the issue of slowness (20s or more) to get maven-metadata files.

This happened for numerous artifacts under the same groupId.

All these tasks were run with no success of deleting thexe maven-metadata.xml files

• Repair - Rebuild Maven repository metadata (maven-metadata.xml)
• Maven - Delete SNAPSHOT
• Cleanup Repositories using their associated policies (with policies defined on the right groupId)
• Rebuild Repository Index
• Compact blob store (probably not related but we tried everything )

Artifacts are, in fact, cleaned but maven-metadata.xml are still there.

After manually, through the UI, removing all these leftover files for a particular groupId, fetching maven-metadata under this groupId was fast again.

This was seen on 3.22.1 and 3.29.2 on our side but may affect other versions as well.