It's fixed! And it wasn't a Gradle bug! It's just *even more cursed than I could have possibly imagined*!
Another Tusky contributor found the solution:
https://github.com/mcclure/Tusky/pull/1/files
When you call providers.exec {} to call a command line file, this *looks* like a function, *but it isn't*. It's a "task", which is some Gradle thing, and it's *expected* to fail the whole build instantly instead of throwing an exception.
You have to *request* an exception, with flag
executionResult.rethrowFailure()