Yeah and last time I used it at work (2012-2013) it didn't even support incremental builds. Even the company's best Java developers just accepted this as normal.
I think maven did not push incremental builds because there was not a big need.
Most people code Java in an IDE. Both Idea and Eclipse do incremental builds inside the IDE. So as you are coding, you are incremental building.
Every place I have used maven, maven was used for the build server and the final release. Spinning on a webpage changing some code? You are using your IDE for that.
(Now scala is a little bit different, so we have SBT with incremental support as a pretty ground level thing)
See https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAVEN/Incrementa... for proof. That may have been implemented in the meantime but the fact is that maven had no support for incremental builds for at least 10 years (released in 2002). Amazing.