I don't understand why Gradle doesn't just provide the wrapper for download. They do provide the checksums [0], so it's not like the wrapper is customized for each repo or anything, but to download it you have to download the full distribution, extract the archive to extract the archive to extract the archive and run Gradle to run Gradle.

The properties file specifying the version and checksum is great, but we shouldn't need millions of identical copies of the binary itself checked into every repo.

[0] https://services.gradle.org/distributions/