I had the similar problem, only it was on a remote machine where the tests were executed via a azure pipeline:

- task: Maven@3       
    inputs:         
    mavenPomFile: 'pom.xml'         
    goals: 'clean verify'         
    options: '--quiet -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -f pom.xml -Dcucumber.options="--plugin pretty src/test/java/acceptancetests/testCases"'

It accured only after adding the --plugin/pretty part. After removing it from the command, I worked fine again. I still don't know why this plugin doesn't create the cucumber.json file.