It sounds like you’re concerned with an implementation detail that doesn’t have any effect on whether the functionality is working as intended.
If you specify JVM arguments that require forking, Gradle will fork a new JVM. Regardless of whether or not you want a daemon process, the class that runs is called GradleDaemon. The --no-daemon switch should cause the forked process to be single use instead of a long running daemon process, but it’s still going to run the GradleDaemon class.
If you can see the GradleDaemon process once that build completes, then that is a different issue, but not what you described.