That's not how people use Gradle though, it's a footgun, it's happened over and over in my career that Gradle build files were extremely hard to parse and under

That's not how people use Gradle though, it's a footgun, it's happened over and over in my career that Gradle build files were extremely hard to parse and understand as a human. That is a failure of the tool, it allows people to do that so people do it. Same issue I had with Ruby and Scala codebases...