Why does gradle on Mac require optional dependencies that are turned off?

Question

I am building a react-native project that used to have buildscript like this

buildscript {
    ext {
        buildToolsVersion = "33.0.0"
        minSdkVersion = 23
        compileSdkVersion = 33
        targetSdkVersion = 33
        ndkVersion = "23.1.7779620"
        kotlinVersion = "1.8.0"
        kotlin_version = "1.8.0"
    }
    repositories {
        google()
        mavenCentral()
    }
    dependencies {
        ...plugins
    }
}

And this has worked fine for building android apps. However recently I wanted to also use Huawei HMS system, so I had to modify this build to look like this:

buildscript {
    ext {
        ...same versions
        // Required due to a Notifee & HMS issue:
        reactNativeProjects = []
    }
        
    repositories {
        maven { url 'https://developer.huawei.com/repo/' }
        if (System.getenv("ANDROID_VENDOR") == "huawei") {
            maven { url "$rootDir/../node_modules/@notifee/react-native/android/libs" }
            maven { url "https://pdftron-maven.s3.amazonaws.com/release" }
        }
        else {
            google()
        }
        mavenCentral()
    }
    dependencies {
        ...same plugins
        classpath('com.huawei.agconnect:agcp:1.4.1.300')
    }
}

allprojects {
    repositories {
        mavenCentral()
        maven { url 'https://developer.huawei.com/repo/' }
        if(System.getenv("ANDROID_VENDOR") == "huawei") {
            maven { url "https://pdftron-maven.s3.amazonaws.com/release" }
            maven { url "$rootDir/../node_modules/@notifee/react-native/android/libs" }
        }
    }
}

In theory, if ANDROID_VENDOR == 'google' then I should get the same result as before. However I do not - I get error

> Could not resolve all task dependencies for configuration ':app:debugRuntimeClasspath'.
   > Could not find any matches for app.notifee:core:+ as no versions of app.notifee:core are available.
     Searched in the following locations:
       - https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2/app/notifee/core/maven-metadata.xml
       - https://developer.huawei.com/repo/app/notifee/core/maven-metadata.xml
       - https://dl.google.com/dl/android/maven2/app/notifee/core/maven-metadata.xml
       - https://www.jitpack.io/app/notifee/core/maven-metadata.xml
     Required by:
         project :app > project :notifee_react-native

and similar for pdftron. If I remove the if statement in allprojects, the Google build will work as before, but 5 minutes slower (because the pdftron-maven repository takes FOREVER to resolve dependencies).

Why would gradle suddenly care about finding notifee, if its conditions are not satisfied? I also tried purging all caches I could think of, to no avail.

For my colleagues on Windows computers, they apparently don't get any errors and build as normal. For me and my colleagues on Mac, we are affected.