goemaxima maintainer here (sorry for the late response, I did not see this post before)
I probably was a bit too hasty with setting 5.44 as the maxima version. The stack documentations mentions that the version is supported, but it's just not as well-tested.
However as implied by the commit, I'm not really comfortable just downgrading the maxima version as that might be an unexpected breaking change for existing users (I could probably still be persuaded otherwise if other issues spring up).
If you're OK with building your own image, using 5.41 is probably the safest choice. cartesian_product certainly works with the patch and I have personally not run into any other issues with 5.44 though.