‘parent.relativePath’ points at my com.mycompany:MyProject instead of org.apache:apache – Why?

Add an empty <relativePath> to <parent> so that it resolves the parent pom from the repositories.

  <parent>
    <groupId>org.apache</groupId>
    <artifactId>apache</artifactId>
    <version>8</version>
    <relativePath></relativePath>
  </parent>

Here is the relevant doc.

This feature is only for enhancing the development in a local checkout of that project. Set the value to an empty string in case you want to disable the feature and always resolve the parent POM from the repositories.
Default value is: ../pom.xml.