Solved! But there is more to the solution - see the last comment to this post. Basically, if you make the changes in this comment, but still run the Gradle forge_client ("Run Configuration") instead of the "Application", you will still hit this error (the classpath can't be set for Run Configurations in IntelliJ 2020.3).
The issue was two-fold:
My Run Configuration was incorrect
My project's Gradle settings were incorrect
Post-mortem:
The Run Configuration could not be corrected without first correcting the Gradle settings
The option you need to select simply won't show if the project's Gradle settings are incorrect (kind of a "duh" moment, but as I mentioned, I am relatively inexperienced with IntelliJ ๐
You have to fix Gradle before you can fix your run configuration
I'm not entirely sure of how "obvious" this may seem to most, but I had no clue:
Use gradle from 'gradle-wrapper.properties' file
Set the Gradle JVM to the "Project SDK" (NOT OpenJDK - not sure why, yet)
Once you fix the Gradle settings, rebuild the Gradle project then run edit the Run Configuration for the forge_client task
After fixing your Gradle, you should be able to click the dropdown and change it from -cp Forge.forge to -cp Forge.forge.userdev (you should see the option available to you - if not, something else is going on and I don't know how to help you... sorry ๐)
Save the change to your Run Configuration > run the genIntellijRuns task > run the forge_client task > you should be good to go now!
Screenshots: