De-activate a maven profile from command line

Yes indeed, you have the right way.
From maven profiles user guide

Deactivating a profile

Starting with Maven 2.0.10, one or more profiles can be deactivated using the command line by prefixing their identifier with either the character ‘!’ or ‘-‘ as shown below:

mvn groupId:artifactId:goal -P !profile-1,!profile-2

This can be used to deactivate profiles marked as activeByDefault or profiles that would otherwise be activated through their activation config.

As noted by @Calfater in the comments, the exclamation mark needs to be escaped in most shells (bash, zsh, and others on Linux and MacOS), though not on the windows command line.

The escape mechanisms are shell-dependant, but usually you can do :

mvn groupId:artifactId:goal -P \!profile-1

Or

mvn groupId:artifactId:goal -P '!profile-1'

Or, as Shaun Morris suggested below, use - instead of !, but without whitespace between -P and the profiles:

mvn groupId:artifactId:goal -P-profile-1,-profile2