I'm pretty sure you would have gotten replies if it was just worded "Does anybody know any possible benefits of using gradle here?" or the like. I don't think it's much more than that.
That would also significantly narrow the scope of the question to something that's actually answerable. "but why gradle?" is basically impossible to decide between "are there advantages to using gradle here", "gradle is abjectly terrible, why are you even using it", "gradle isn't available when compiling on an android device, why don't you use something with better platform support" or any number of more/less extreme/trollish questions/"questions".