@Chris_Dore thanks for your answer - I have added a “consume task” just for demonstration, but in practice I don’t have one, the file is meant to be consumed by the Android Gradle Plugin internally.
Even the “Gradle sync” option in Android Studio / Intellij (not sure what it means in Gradle terms, I guess it simply evaluates projects) fails, so before you could even run your own task.
Basically when applied on top of the build file, the AGP (com.android.application) registers the artifact transform I mentioned earlier and this fails when executed. Am I missing something? Shouldn’t the artifact transform be passed a list of resolved files, thus invoke my task?