This project does not compile for me at the moment.
I narrowed the problem to this dependency setting in pom.xml:

        <dependency>
            <groupId>net.sourceforge.owlapi</groupId>
            <artifactId>owlapi-osgidistribution</artifactId>
            <version>[4.1.3,5.0.0)</version>
        </dependency>

Notice the version range.
This instructs maven to take the latest version of the artifact within the given range.
In my case, it uses 5.0.0-BETA5-SNAPSHOT, which does not seem to have

org.semanticweb.owlapi.rdf.rdfxml.renderer.XMLWriterPreferences

which is used in

org.semanticweb.owl.explanation.telemetry.TelemetryXMLWriter

Because of this version range, also the version that is in maven central has Manifest Import-Package entries for owlapi packages with the ranges "[5.0,6)", which is incompatible with the current version of Protege.
Note that telemetry is used in owlexplanation which is used in explanation-workbench (as embedded dependencies).

A quick fix is to replace the version range with a particular version, e.g.:

<version>4.1.3</version>

but I first wanted to double check, why the version ranges were necessary here?

In principle, when there are several maven dependencies with different version, maven automatically picks up the latest version, so that should not prevent using this telemetry with the later versions of owlapi.
The advantage of the fixed version over the version range is that the builds are stable. That is, if a project with this dependency compiles today, it should also compile next year. With version ranges, it depends on whatever the latest version is present at the moment.