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Nevermind, I can just

from(configurations.foo)

Also, if you actually need the ZIP contents as files and if you want to get even more fancy, you might eventually use an artifact transform to extract the files instead of a

Sync

task. 🙂

I read a bit about those in the docs, but I'm really not sure how to put that into practice. It feels weird to me that they are work that Gradle does, but they're not tasks, do not follow the same input rules, do not have a concept of caching (or it's implemented differently?). I'm struggling to understand when they should be used and how.

It's not correct that they do not follow input rules and do not have caching. There is

@CacheableTransform

with which you can annotate a transform so that its work can also be cached like task outputs. Of course for unpacking it is not worth to mark it cacheable just like it also would not be worth be for an according task.