Managed to do the top level task that runs in around 20 seconds compared per module where it was taking 2 to 3 minutes. In my top level build gradle I ended up having

plugins {
    id "io.gitlab.arturbosch.detekt" version "1.1.1"
}

dependencies {
    detektPlugins "io.gitlab.arturbosch.detekt:detekt-formatting:1.1.1"
}

task detektAll(type: io.gitlab.arturbosch.detekt.Detekt) {
    description = "Runs detekt for the entire project."

    input = files("$projectDir")
    config = files("$rootDir/config/detekt/detekt.yml")
    parallel = false
    includes = ["**/*.kt", "**/*.kts"]
    excludes = ["**/resources/**", "**/build/**", "**/buildSrc/**", "**/test/**/*.kt"]
    baseline = file("$rootDir/config/detekt/baseline.xml")
    reports {
        xml { enabled = false }
        html { enabled = false }
        txt { enabled = false }
    }
}

The detektFormat has

disableDefaultRuleSets

&

buildUponDefaultConfig

which I'm not sure if I should apply. Also noticed that there is no need for a detekt format task if you just set

autoCorrect

to true in the detektAll Only thing I find a bit confusing is that if it can fix all the issues it will fix them but still fail. While on ktlintFormat it would only fail if it is not able to fix any of the issues. The reason I say it is confusing is because I can have 5 issues that only 3 have been fixed but all will be marked as failure. Which leaves the developer in the situation to not know for which ones to look because some of them might have already been fixed. On the other hand for CI this is great because even if it is able to fix them it will fail and sends a clear message of: you have detektIssues run it locally, commit & push

buildUponDefaultConfig

is when you change some rules in your detekt.yml and you don't want to put every rule

And on cli, there's a fail-fast flag that activates all rules and fails if anything isn't right. You then configure those rules you want different or off, and Suppress in code those that are false positives. So a few ways to work with it.

Thanks everyone!