Got the issue solved in the Data Science group. I had been creating my own fat jar by Baeldong's instructions (section 3)
https://www.baeldung.com/gradle-fat-jar
This caused some sort of issue that's unknown to me. I fixed it by using the application plugin as well as the shadowJar plugin (same article but section 6). Running ./gradlew shadowJar created a fat jar that worked and was usable by spark-submit.