node_modules can't find com.android.tools.build:gradle:4.1.1 - react-native

Question

Recently Android Studio was kind enough to offer to upgrade to gradle 6.5.
Naive I was: I clicked yes, then the new upgrade occured and now everytime I build I get this error similar to:
Could not determine the dependencies of task ':app:mergeDebugAssets'.
> Could not resolve all dependencies for configuration ':app:debugRuntimeClasspath'.
> A problem occurred configuring project ':react-native-fs'.
> Could not resolve all artifacts for configuration ':react-native-fs:classpath'.
> Could not find com.android.tools.build:gradle:4.1.1.
Searched in the following locations:
- https://jcenter.bintray.com/com/android/tools/build/gradle/4.1.1/gradle-4.1.1.pom
If the artifact you are trying to retrieve can be found in the repository but without metadata in 'Maven POM' format, you need to adjust the 'metadataSources { ... }' of the repository declaration.
Required by:
project :react-native-fs
my android/build.gradle file has those lines:
buildscript {
repositories {
mavenLocal()
google()
jcenter()
maven { url "$rootDir/../node_modules/react-native/android" }
maven { url 'https://maven.fabric.io/public' }
}
dependencies {
classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:4.1.1'
classpath 'com.google.gms:google-services:4.0.1'
}
}
So life's good for my project, but not for A LOT of modules, which have this:
buildscript {
repositories {
jcenter()
}
dependencies {
classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:4.1.1'
}
}
To solve the issue, I need to add the google() repository.
... but I don't like manually editing any file under the node_modules/ folder as any new install with break them.
Is there a way to fix this ?

Answer 1

Just delete node_modules folder and run
yarn install
or
npm install
reopen project in Android Studio and thats it