This was introduce under the following commit to address transitive dependency issues: -

commit b49586d5c90e673aa1abceef3c047257da6cb19e
Author: Tomaz Cerar <tomaz.cerar@gmail.com>
Date: Mon Apr 24 17:13:16 2017 +0200

JBEAP-10175 JBEAP-10174 Unmanaged transitive dependencies in EJB client BOM dependency tree

However the version override means a version upgrade in core does not get applied to EAP.