…no…no, no it's not over. It's even stranger and more unfathomable than I thought.
On the first build after checkout, clean, git clean, or any change to build.gradle, it works.
On the *second* build, it fails, with an exception that's clearly, unambiguously, inside a try-catch that should catch it. Catching "Throwable" instead of "Exception" doesn't help. This is the Terminator Exception, it can't be caught, it can't be stopped, and it only flags on every *other* build.
In the *build script*.