For anyone following from India here, the ministry of electronics in India caused the Kotlin Gradle Plugin URLs of 1.9.24 to be blocked.
This causes the “this is blocked” HTML page to be downloaded as jar file as the blocking is not accompanied with an according HTTP status response, which can then not be read by Gradle as jar file of course.
Update KGP version to 1.9.25 and it should work. (Until they block that too eventually)