Should be able to disable it same as any other service or daemon, or point it to /dev/null?
If plasma-nm brings it in as a dependency, perhaps rebuild plasma-nm and set modemmanager as an optional dependency - that is what I've done with NetworkManager for sometime (
along with some other wifi and bluetooth things (neither of which i use)
that always complained in the journal boot logs). I then set NetworkManager to ignore pacman updates, and have to rebuild it every time updates are available. As an optional dependency, you can -Rdd or -Rns modemmanager then (check
pacman Wiki for correct removal). There are probably many others here that know better more effective ways, but for me it works and is no big deal, I don't build many packages so it at least is a good refresher