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I'd say depends on whether you have ephemeral build agents or not. If you use build agents to run multiple builds, the builds will of course benefit from the local build cache too. If you have single-use build agent instances or run builds always in single-use docker containers, then there is little sense in having a local build cache that is then deleted right after the build anyway.

Good point! We have ephemeral build agents. But we are building several modules at once that have interdependencies, not sure if the local cache helps in that situation or not. I guess not.

Assuming multiple calls to Gradle, it should be able to use the files from the buildDirs without needing the local build cache (i.e. everything is 'UP TO DATE', not 'FROM CACHE'). If you only have a single Gradle invocation, then local cache is definitely not needed with ephemeral build agents, as each task will be executed only once anyway.