Is there a reason applying the

kotlin-dsl

plugin in buildSrc fetches the plugin and a bunch of Kotlin compiler dependencies from the plugin portal, and doesn't use the JARs that ship with the Gradle distribution?

The Kotlin Gradle plugin is not shipped with Gradle so it must be downloaded

ah good to know

It used to be the case that Gradle would setup a local repository with the shipped jars (stdlib and reflect) so they wouldn't be downloaded but that was adding complexity for little gain so it was removed