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I think just declaring it without version should take the version of the transitive dependency. A fallback might be harder to do.

I think that you can declare them with the earliest known version and gradle should resolve the conflict to the transitive version coming in at all times. Not sure if that works without declaring a version if no dependency management is configured 🤔

Thanks @Vampire that does work - I was thrown off because there are actually two sibling deps, but only one of them is brought in transitively. Which makes it harder still!

If that dependency does not properly publish alignment of versions for sibling libs, you could mitigate that in your build using a component metadata rule, either using a BOM if they have at least that, or via virtual platform if not: https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/dependency_version_alignment.html#sec:align-versions-unpublished

Thanks!