Comment by SpaghettiCthulu

It's not just Android. I've encountered frequent broken gradle caching when using Kotlin outside of Android and when using Fabric for building Minecraft mods. In my experience, the only solution is wiping the user-wide gradle cache. Maybe it's a gradle issue or maybe it's an ecosystem issue (i.e. gradle plugins not respecting Gradle's cache semantics). Regardless, it does not reflect well on Gradle that such issues are so widespread.