ghreat... I think I found a bug in how intellij handles creating the classpath from gradle... gradle says that logback isn't on the classpath (via dependencyInsight) and yet, intellij keeps adding it when I click the "run" button. that said, adding this module replace (by itself) in my plugin obviously wasn't work. Still load order sensitive. Guess I'll have to write a plugin just for spring boot, or something... I didn't want to add spring boot deps to all modules

modules {
    module("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-logging") {
      replacedBy(
        "org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-log4j2",
        "Use Log4j2 instead of Logback",
      )
    }
  }