Comment by mid-kid
I agree, this should be the case, but Gradle specifically relies on downloading prebuilt java libraries and such to build itself and anything you build with it, and sometimes these have prebuilt native code inside. Unlike buildroot and any linux distribution, there's no metadata to figure out how to build each library, and the process for them is different between each library (no standards like make, autotools and cmake), so building the gradle ecosystem from source is very tedious and difficult.
having worked with both mvn and gradle, i always have a good chuckle when i hear about npm "supply chain" hacks.