C and C++ projects often predate Gradle by decades they will not change their build system without a compelling reason.
Gradle is written in Java and requires a Java Runtime.
At least for C++, CMake has pretty much become the standard build tool.
Dependency resolution on Linux was ‘solved’ by relying on the distribution. Today, there also exist package managers for C and C++ like vcpkg or conan and they also integrate with CMake.
The creator of that apparently got really angry when people told them that it looked like garbage.