Another item pointed out while mistakenly code reviewing a gradlew I thought a team member had written:
"I learned this from the google code convention on shell script, pretty convincingly it is always better to use “$( … )” instead of backticks "…"
In summary the dollar sign parens syntax always nests and is easier to read than backticks.
So an improvement could be to remove backticks in favor of “$()” syntax in the generated gradlew shell script.