Second issue is the famous lazy vs eager mistake which everyone makes, including... Gradle experts.

tasks.withType(...) { ... }

is eager, you must use

tasks.withType(...).configureEach { ... }

btw, that would be a good breaking change in 8 to make this lazy by default

but if you want a reason why people find Gradle complicated, here you go: copy and paste perfectly fine code from a couple years ago, today it's a bad practice 😄