I've long since given up on Gradle being able to get this stuff right. The syntax they're proposing is the THIRD similar-but-incompatible syntax they've adopted after Groovy and Kotlin. Good luck figuring out which is in use by looking at a code sample.

The biggest problem with Gradle is not Kotlin or even Groovy syntax. Kotlin isn't a bad language to use even for writing configuration. It's that the entire thing is designed in extremely confusing ways from back to front, and has a lot of awkward design choices and bugs that result in a hyper-complex user model.

What the JVM world needs is a totally new tool that has the same feature set as Gradle but with a drastically simpler mental model behind it. The only real contender right now is Bazel, I think.