When trying to upgrade the packages in flutter/packages repo to use AGP 8, we encountered this sort of build failure. This indicates that the app using those packages may be too low to be compatible with a newer AGP version. This is blocking the upgrade to AGP 8 at least in flutter/packages.

To unblock the upgrade and also provide better error handling, this Gradle error should be rethrown with a more helpful error message indicating how to fix the issue. To finish unblocking the upgrade, the legacy project used for testing will need its AGP and Gradle versions upgraded (feel free to take over flutter/packages#5032 if I don't end up doing this).