Cannot get property 'parentFile' on null object - when using reversed folder structure

[a-dominiak]

Hey, we're creating brownfield app (RN as module in existing native apps) and we have reversed folder structure - (ios and android repos have react-native folders inside them, not vice versa).
I wanted to use react-native-firebase however it gives me following error:

Build file '/Users/xxx/yyy/android/react-native/node_modules/@react-native-firebase/analytics/android/build.gradle' line: 178 * What went wrong:
A problem occurred evaluating project ':@react-native-firebase_analytics'.
> Cannot get property 'parentFile' on null object * Try:
> Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace.
...

Here's the line that gives an error (both in app and analytics packages):

ReactNative.module.applyReactNativeDependency("api")

The problem is that my IDE does NOT show any definition of applyReactNativeDependency method and when I just search for .parentFile and then print/log anything before all of the occurences' it doesn't print any of those logs directly before error appears.