I've spent some time on this. The problem is a result of the change from buildSrc to an included build (composite subproject). I don't think this should matter much but task ordering from the composite affects and is tangled with the top level project tasks - I filed this issue and provided a link to an excellent comment explaining why running clean and other tasks at the same time confuses gradle's task execution graph:
https://github.com/apache/lucene/issues/13567 I don't think there is any fix for this - those included composite builds are a nice way of applying the same verification logic across multiple things... As the gradle employee mentioned, the workaround for now is to run gradlew clean separately from any other task (if you need it). Dawid