Trying shadow a dependency with runClient configuration

[OppenDev]

Hi all, 

I have the following issue: I'd like to parse some json using gson and rely on the (somewhat new) java record types. This is supported in gson 2.10+. Gson is already a dependency used by minecraft, however it's 2.8.x for 1.19.2 which I'm targeting at the moment.

My idea was to include the newer version of the library in my mod and then shadow it so it gets used inside the scope of my mod instead of the older 2.8.
This works fine for building the jar: If I decompile my mod.jar, I can see that it's correctly using the shadowed classes.

However obviously when using the runClient intellj config, the shadowing doesn't get invoked. Is there any way of invoking shadow when using runClient, or am I on the wrong track and there's a better way of doing this entirely?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Edit: After some further thinking, I've come up with this abomination:
 

build.gradle

// New task for extracting the result of shadowJar into the classes directory
// This includes our shadowed gson jar
tasks.register("extractShadowJar", Copy) {
	// Depend on shadowJar so we always use the up to date version of the shadowed content
    dependsOn shadowJar
    from(zipTree(shadowJar.archiveFile)) {
        // filter to copy only our code (and ignore assets, META-INF, etc)
        // Also copies gson as it gets shadowed into com.oppendev.shadow.gson
        include "com/**"
    }
    duplicatesStrategy(DuplicatesStrategy.INCLUDE)
    into("$buildDir/classes/java/main") // Extract into the classes directory
}

// Tell gradle to invoke our new task before executing any java code. This way we ensure that we use the shadowed gson
tasks.withType(JavaExec).configureEach {
    dependsOn(extractShadowJar)
}

// Shadow config
shadowJar {
    relocate 'com.google.gson', 'com.oppendev.shadow.gson'
    configurations = [project.configurations.runtimeClasspath]
    zip64 true

    dependencies {
        include(dependency('com.google.code.gson:gson'))
    }
}

Is this a reasonable thing to do? Is this completely cursed and I should burn in dev ops hell? Is there a better way to do this? Feel free to grill me in the replies

Edited February 6 by OppenDev