In general we want to keep our example apps updated to recent versions of AGP and Gradle:

• Ensures compatibility with recent versions of AGP/Gradle that many users will be using
• Ensures compatibility with recent related toolchains (e.g., the latest version of Android Studio doesn't easily work with AGP 4.1)
• In some cases, avoids hard-to-understand errors when updating dependencies

However, the downside is that we aren't testing with old versions of AGP; #125621 and #125482 are examples of recent cases where we broke people using old versions of AGP with changes that were fine on current versions. Ideally we should have testing in CI that builds all of our Android plugins in a project that uses the oldest version of AGP that flutter supports.