I've run into a strange issue. I have a "toplevel" project which depends on a platform and directly on a few other dependencies, and has failOnVersionConflict turned on. Those dependencies conflict on a transitive dependency which is not handled by the platform, so I tossed a constraint into the toplevel project to cover it for now. However, when I wrote that constraint into the toplevel project, a subdependency of the now-constrained transitive dependency raised a version conflict. What is strange about this, is that the subdependency should be covered by a strict constraint in the platform. Adding yet another (matching) constraint to the toplevel project fixes this... but the issue cascades to more dependencies. I do not understand how constraints between projects interact and how inheritance is handled. Or perhaps I've landed on a Gradle bug?