Many maven plug-ins support skipping the plug-in altogether when skip is set to true in the configuration. In a big tree of modules, that can be useful for supporting setting up reasonable defaults, and then opting out in modules where this is not necessary. So, e.g.:
<plugin>
<groupId>com.diffplug.spotless</groupId>
<artifactId>spotless-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<skip>true</skip>
</configuration>
</plugin>