How to skip bundling during react-native android build

Since upgrading react-native from 0.67 to 0.71.7 i'm unable to build android the same way. Previously, android/app/build.gradle had the bundleInRelease option to skip bundling as part of the gradle build:

project.ext.react = [
    bundleInRelease: false,
    // ...

I would use react-native bundle to produce a bundle file, and then gradlew buildRelease would not do any bundling. I'd like to continue building this same way due to our CI setup constraints.

After upgrading, the android/app/build.gradle does not allow the bundleInRelease flag:

> Could not set unknown property 'bundleInRelease' for extension 'react' of type com.facebook.react.ReactExtension.

I've tried setting the entryFile to point to the android bundle file (in android/app/build.gradle):

react {
  entryFile = file("src/bundle/assets/index.android.bundle")
  // ...

this results in error:
> ReferenceError: SHA-1 for file /Users/josh/mobile-mobapp/android/app/src/bundle/assets/index.android.bundle (/Users/josh/mobile-mobapp/android/app/src/bundle/assets/index.android.bundle) is not computed.
Potential causes:
1) You have symlinks in your project - watchman does not follow symlinks.
2) Check blockList in your metro.config.js and make sure it isn't excluding the file path.
at DependencyGraph.getSha1 (/Users/josh/mobile-mobapp/node_modules/metro/src/node-haste/DependencyGraph.js:194:13)
at Transformer._getSha1 (/Users/josh/mobile-mobapp/node_modules/metro/src/Bundler.js:26:26)
at Transformer.transformFile (/Users/josh/mobile-mobapp/node_modules/metro/src/DeltaBundler/Transformer.js:108:19)
at Bundler.transformFile (/Users/josh/mobile-mobapp/node_modules/metro/src/Bundler.js:60:30)

Also tried building android excluding the bundling task:

gradlew buildRelease -x createBundleReleaseJsAndAssets

error:
> Execution failed for task ':app:mergeReleaseAssets'.
> Querying the mapped value of list(interface java.util.Collection, org.gradle.api.internal.provider.AbstractCollectionProperty$CollectingSupplier@68df0a5) before task ':app:createBundleReleaseJsAndAssets' has completed is not supported

Any ideas how to do this?

You can use debuggableVariants inside react{ ... }

> debuggableVariants = ["release"]

Note: debuggableVariants is the list of variants that are debuggable. For those react-native-gradle-plugin skip the bundling of the JS bundle and the assets. By default is just 'debug'.
If you add flavors like lite, prod, etc. you'll have to list your debuggableVariants.