Just my 2c but out team is all using up to date maven versions rather than the old one installed with SDK by default (for support of newer Confluence versions), and we have asked them to place settings.xml in <userhome>/.m2/settings.xml which maven will pick up and doesn’t need to change with the SDK version.
We have to customize our settings.xml for some internal artifact repos, but I think in theory you could just either copy paste or link the original one that comes with the SDK into that location (assuming you don’t have any company specific settings)