When we move to supported 7.x (7.6.4 or later) and 8.x (8.3 or later) failing fast for an unsupported versions of Gradle will become pointless. Versions earlier than 7.6.4 and 8.3 do not support multi-release jar files so loading the plugin and its spring-core dependency will fail before there is a chance for the version verification logic to run.
We can reinstate this logic when we raise the minimum supported version again in the future.