The short answer is that I had to do a lot of exclude group: (with help from ChatGPT) to avoid collisions when moving to groovy4;

https://github.com/quiltdata/nf-quilt/blob/main/plugins/nf-quilt/build.gradle

There were also some weird version issues in my codebase. Here's the definitions that finally worked:

groovyVersion = 4.0.24
groovyV = groovy-4.0
groovySource = apache
jdkVersion = 11
javaLangVersion = 21