I'm afraid the change looks strange.

Can you please clarify what is the point of manually adding a module to the generated pom?
Every time you edit pom.xml it creates a discrepancy between the published pom.xml and Gradle Metadata.

So if you want something to appear (or disappear) in pom.xml, it should be implemented with altering the relevant Gradle configurations rather than edits to the pom.xml string. That would ensure pom.xml does not contradict metadata file.

Hmm, it should probably use SoftwareComponentFactory to create a new component to publish. However, SoftwareComponentFactory (and Gradle Module Metadata) didn't exist until Gradle 5.3, and this code was written to support older Gradle versions.

But shadow now requires Gradle 6, so it could be changed now.

This seems like a new bug to me, introduced by the availability of a new form of metadata.

Yeah, I'm trying to navigate the various patterns here. I previously had create my own "component" using the shadow.component method because SoftwareComponent wasn't public API.