is using gson the best way to extract data from json using kotlin? Everything I've searched for kind of points to it, or has something else came along?

check out Moshi, it works really well with Kotlin https://github.com/square/moshi

will do!!! thanks!

Gson is definitely not the best choice for Kotlin. Because Gson doesn’t provide any Kotlin-specific library and know nothing about Kotlin features and nullability. But with some effort and with some caution can be used with Kotlin Jackson also has special adapter library for Kotlin

I had decent experience with Kotlin’s experimental serialization library: https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.serialization

I want to thank everyone who put in their suggestions. Thank you all very much!