How to disable Gradle daemon in IntelliJ Idea?

IntelliJ interacts with Gradle via the Gradle tooling API, which always uses the daemon. i.e. There is no way to turn it off.

What you could do (after filing a bug report) is not to use the IntelliJ Gradle integration but instead generate IntelliJ project files with

gradle idea

Because of lack of support of old libraries I moved a project from gradle to maven build management tool. But Intellij always wanted me to trigger a gradle changes import: additionally to "Maven project needs to be updated", there was also a "Gradle project needs to be updated" when I did changes to i.e. dependencies in pom.xml, with no integration of gradle in the project source files at all, no wrapper etc.

In my case I was able to get rid of Intellij bothering me with gradle by deleting the line<property name="settings.editor.selected.configurable" value="reference.settingsdialog.project.gradle" /> in .idea/workspace.xml and deleting the file .idea/gradle.xml in Intellij IDEA Ultimate 2019.2.

I had a related problem and managed to disable the daemon through a config - I added org.gradle.daemon=false to a gradle.properties file in the project root folder. As explained here: Disabling Gradle daemon in a specific project.