you should use the verison of the dep in place of the project version

Hmm the parent of hte pom is mule-plugin-mgmt-parent-pom. Check if the plugin is defined in the plugin mangement section of the mule-plugin-mgmt-parent-pom. In that case as it is already defined in the parent it shouldn't fail the enforcer.

For latest/dry-run the version in ConfigReleaseVersions is: mule_module_maven_plugin="1.9.0-20241126" and that matches the pom.xml version: <version>1.9.0-20241126</version>.

I don't want to hardcode the value, is there any scenario when the versions might differ?

Or we just simply use a custom variable so our process update that property automatically?

Yes, a new property like muleModuleMavenPluginVersion and you need to add a new dep entry in the mule-runtime-release config files, like it is done in mule repo https://github.com/mulesoft/mule/blob/master/pom.xml#L181 https://github.com/mulesoft/mule/blob/master/pom.xml#L494.

But as mentioned in htis comment #247 (comment) ideally avoid using a version here and try to use add the plugin to the the plugins parent https://github.com/mulesoft/mule-runtime-bom/blob/master/mule-plugin-mgmt-parent-pom/pom.xml

That is exactly the property we should use: muleModuleMavenPluginVersion I recicled that, it is already declared in our internal config.