You can depend on version ranges with Gradle, and those ranges are transitive if the library is also using Gradle; otherwise, you can override a library's trans

You can depend on version ranges with Gradle, and those ranges are transitive if the library is also using Gradle; otherwise, you can override a library's transitive dependencies pretty easily with component metadata rules. You can do so much with Gradle, but 90% of learning it is figuring out what knobs you need to twist; there's a lot of feature overlap and second-system-effect going on.