Is there a Gradle equivalent to the publishToMavenLocal task of the maven-publish Gradle plugin

Question

I apply plugin: 'maven-publish' in my build.gradle in order to install artifacts into the local ~/.m2 Maven repository by executing gradle publishToMavenLocal.

I have now searched for a while and I found lots of information on how to publishToMavenLocal, but none on how to publish into the local ~/.gradle directory. I tried publishToGradleLocal, but the task does not exist. Also, the plugin code makes me assume that there is support for Gradle repositories, but for Maven repositories, only.

• If such exists, which is the common way to publish directly into the local ~/.gradle directory?
• If not, I understand that publishToMavenLocal makes the artifact available for both Maven and Gradle, which is nice. However, Gradle usually caches its dependencies in .gradle, which has - as I assume - advantages over caching in ~/.m2. It's just a guess, but why else would they not directly cache in ~/.m2 in order to make JARs by default always available to Maven and to save disk space? So the plugin developer chose to not go with Gradle standards. I wonder why. Is there a well-documented, non-opinion-based reasen for this?