Todo: tune this list to reduce the size of the shaded artifact, currently 43 MB. (Just to compare, Kotlin is 52 MB: https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.jetbrains.kotlin/kotlin-compiler-embeddable/1.8.20)

With shadow, further size reduction is not possible, because shadow uses artifacts to minimize jars. The biggest jars are lang-impl (19 MB) and ide-impl (18 MB). The resulting jar is still 43 MB, but without minimizing it is 67 MB.

This one I don't quite understand, we weren't shading it before, were there issues with that setup?

I just want to remove all dependencies from the Gradle plugin to have a clean classpath. There is no reason to have JDBC driver on the Gradle classpath.

with the JDBC driver specifically it may cause issues if someone currently has a setup where the override the xerial sqlite version locally to test their migrations on a different sqlite version

Yeah, but now the user just needs to overwrite the version explicitly using the configuration and dependencies:

// build.gradle.kts
val fooDB by sqldelight.databases.registering {
  dialect("sqlite")...
}

dependencies {
  fooDB.configurationName("my-special-sqlite-driver")
}

Or use similar groovy syntax.

And with classloader isolation, which is enabled since 2.0.0: 077837a#diff-202cb8a4767ef0496a1551b59461db6625ca9aad2ddf92fefc467a07887cfe01, this is the only option to overwrite the driver, or do I miss something?