Android Studio – cannot access 'androidx.dataBinding.observable' (even though data binding class is generated)

I’m having trouble implementing data binding in my Android Studio project. I get the following error:

Cannot access ‘androidx.databinding.Observable’ which is a supertype
of ‘com.russ.beatbox.databinding.MainActivityBinding’. Check your
module classpath for missing or conflicting dependencies

Even though i have all the Gradle dependencies and the binding class is generated. I’ve tried rebuilding, invalidate cache/restart, clean project, renaming the file, and using different Gradle import syntax, nothing seems to work. Is this Android Studio bug?

Here’s my MainActivity, the error comes from binding.recView.apply:

package com.russ.beatbox

import androidx.appcompat.app.AppCompatActivity
import android.os.Bundle
import androidx.databinding.DataBindingUtil
import androidx.recyclerview.widget.GridLayoutManager
import com.russ.beatbox.databinding.MainActivityBinding

class MainActivity : AppCompatActivity() {
    override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)

        val binding: MainActivityBinding =
            DataBindingUtil.setContentView(this, R.layout.main_activity)



        binding.recView.apply{
            layoutManager = GridLayoutManager(context, 3)
        }
    }
}

My layout:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<layout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
    <androidx.recyclerview.widget.RecyclerView

        android:id="@+id/rec_view"
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:layout_height="match_parent" />
</layout>

And my module Gradle file:

apply plugin: 'com.android.application'
apply plugin: 'kotlin-android'
apply plugin: 'kotlin-kapt'

android {
    compileSdk 31

    defaultConfig {
        applicationId "com.russ.beatbox"
        minSdk 23
        targetSdk 31
        versionCode 1
        versionName "1.0"

        testInstrumentationRunner "androidx.test.runner.AndroidJUnitRunner"
    }

    buildTypes {
        release {
            minifyEnabled false
            proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android-optimize.txt'), 'proguard-rules.pro'
        }
    }

    buildFeatures{
        dataBinding = true
    }

    compileOptions {
        sourceCompatibility JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8
        targetCompatibility JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8
    }
    kotlinOptions {
        jvmTarget = '1.8'
    }
}

dependencies {

    implementation 'androidx.core:core-ktx:1.7.0'
    implementation 'androidx.appcompat:appcompat:1.3.1'
    implementation 'com.google.android.material:material:1.4.0'
    implementation 'androidx.constraintlayout:constraintlayout:2.1.1'
    androidTestImplementation 'androidx.test.ext:junit:1.1.3'
    androidTestImplementation 'androidx.test.espresso:espresso-core:3.4.0'
}