Migrate off cross-project configuration in all sub-projects

[alexander-yevsyukov]

This is a meta-issue, which is going to have links to issues in corresponding repositories in subprojects when we get down to working on it.

Here's the story. We were experimenting with migrating dependencies to Gradle's Version Catalog feature in the time subproject. It revealed some of the issues in Gradle. During discussions of one of them an engineer from Gradle pointed out that cross-project configuration is discouraged.

The Gradle engineer advised to use sharing convention plugins, which can be also used in buildSrc.

Although the comment did not relate directly to that issue of the Version Catalog implementation and our usage of the feature. It still revealed that we may improve the way we use Gradle in our projects. We do use subprojects {} a lot, and it's a discouraged way of doing things.

Addressing this issue would make our builds easier to understand because most of the things we do in subprojects are largely repeated from repository to repository.

[alexander-yevsyukov]

@armiol, FYI. It can be a good starter task from a newcomer.