Unfortunately, you need to rebuild your artifact if you modify your pom file. Otherwise, your state in your VCS will not represent the state you are working with.
Let's make an example. Project A, project B, where B depends on A:
Project A: pom.xml
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version> Some dependencies etc.
Project B: pom.xml
<version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version> Some dependencies etc. <dependency> <groupId>project.a</groupId> <artifactId>A</artifactId> <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version> </dependency>
Now you create projects A and B. The state in your repository represents the states of the pom files with their state / dependencies for SNAPSHOT.
You will now modify Project A to make it "free" from it, but you are not restoring your artifact. The lower your version control, or maybe you flag it.
Project A: pom.xml
<version>1.0</version> Some dependencies etc.
Secondly, you do the same with project B: Project B: pom.xml
<version>1.0</version> Some dependencies etc. <dependency> <groupId>project.a</groupId> <artifactId>A</artifactId> <version>1.0</version> </dependency>
But you also do not restore your artifact. As a result, your repository contains artifacts that represent the state of SNAPSHOT, but your version control says something else. This is a very simple example of a problem. If you have more projects, etc., the worse it will be.
In addition, I would change my mind about changing the structure of the project, because based on what you wrote about the dependencies, it looks like this project should be released together, so it would be nice to create a multi-module assembly from them,
Alternatively, rebuilding can be done using the appropriate jobs in Jenkins that can handle dependencies, or you can use the assembly of the pipeline plugin to handle such things,
But another question comes to my mind: why have your builds taken so long? You can explore why they take so long and shorten release time at all.