In Ant, there are a bunch of default exclusion patterns defined for directory-based tasks, see Section Default Excludes here: https://ant.apache.org/manual/dirtasks.html
Does the Gradle copy task (and its sub tasks) specify the same default excludes? If this is the case, it should be documented somewhere here https://docs.gradle.org/current/dsl/org.gradle.api.tasks.Copy.html. If this is not the case, consider this posting a feature request to add the same default exclusion patterns that Ant defines.