Mal = sick, in the sense of the prefix ill-, that is, "poorly"

So maladaptive is just "not well-adapted". The question is, adapted to what. Clinically, it should in an ideal world mean, "behavior that doesn't serve the patient's rational self-interest", or possibly, "behavior that hinders the patient's desired or practically necessary social interaction and integration".

In practice, as you point out, it tends to mean, "refusal to conform" or "an imagined insistence on making the rest of us inconvenienced or uncomfortable".

A lot depends on what, respectfully, the patient wants for themselves. My son for example suffered from Schizoid Personality Disorder. Unlike a person with Asperger's, who wants to connect but can't, he didn't even want to connect. Connections with others, to him, were meaningless and painful. He was aware that other people wanted connection, and tried to humor them as much as he could stand (hence he had empathy and was not a sociopath), but people with SPD have been known to spot someone they know as they walk down the street, and duck into a store front to avoid meeting them.

So I did not try to force social interactions on my son, out of respect for his atypical way of being; but on the other hand I did not allow him to totally avoid them, either, because he had to learn to function in the world, to interact with, e.g., employers. I pushed him to get out of his comfort zone when necessary. Failing to take care of oneself and one's legitimate responsibilities would define "maladaptive" in terms of what I see as a valid clinical definition of that word.

Even such a failure is not necessarily cause for putative responses; if the person truly can't function, then they can't. They probably need special accommodations and help, perhaps permanently. Sadly, our society is pretty ... maladaptive when it comes to taking care of vulnerable people who need help.

I agree and Nature has no definition for "normal".