That was the trap. A silent, cruel quirk of the Android ecosystem. A library deep in his dependency tree—some legacy ad mediation SDK—was compiled against 33.0.0. Not 33.0.1. Not 34. The exact checksum of 33.0.0. Any other version broke the AAPT2 binary compatibility.
./gradlew clean assembleDebug
“But they’re newer!” he muttered. “Why would it need the older one?” android sdk build-tools 33.0.0 download
https://dl.google.com/android/repository/build-tools_r33.0.0-linux.zip That was the trap
Leo pieced it together:
He opened a browser and typed the search: That was the trap. A silent