The short story is - I installed the latest version of Gradle (via Chocolatey), and when the installation was completed, I saw that USER_HOME/.gradle was still missing the gradle.properties file. Is this intended, or do I need to add it myself?
This is intended.
This file never is auto-generated, why should it?
If it is empty, it is just noise.
Or actually it has bad impact even, if just little, as every build has to open the file and read its content just to see that it is empty.
So if you want to set any property in there, just create the file.
OK, thank you very much for the help!