android: ext broken in app.gradle on tns-android@next

Environment Provide version numbers for the following components (information can be retrieved by running tns info in your project folder or by inspecting the package.json of the project:

• CLI: 4.2.4
• Cross-platform modules: 4.2.1
• Android Runtime: 4.3(@next) to @next

Describe the bug

After build 4.3.0-2018-08-10-09, the ext and project.ext part of app.gradle is ignored.

To Reproduce Easy way:

• create an empty project
• tns plugin add nativescript-plugin-firebase
• set on app.gradle:

ext {
  googlePlayServicesVersion = "10.0.1"
}

this should print:

* What went wrong:
A problem occurred evaluating script.
>  googlePlayServicesVersion set too low, please update to at least 15.0.0 / 15.0.+ (currently set to 10.0.1)

But it doesn’t, and it continues ignoring the ext part.

Manually setting ext in platforms/android/build.gradle works as expected.

Expected behavior

ext is not ignored.

Sample project

any project with android@4.3.0-2018-08-10-09 or above will do

Additional context

this seems to be happening since this commit: https://github.com/NativeScript/android-runtime/commit/0c83f7cc6ae8c7b9f15bd0586ac60428c42f77bd