Kotlin and Android Development featuring Jetpack: $kotlin_version ? (page 8)

I’m running Android Studio “Arctic Fox” 2020.3.1 Patch 2, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I only made it to page 8 before running into my first brick wall:

Gradle sync is failing on implementation "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib-jdk8:$kotlin_version"

A problem occurred evaluating project ':app'.
> Could not get unknown property 'kotlin_version' for object of type org.gradle.api.internal.artifacts.dsl.dependencies.DefaultDependencyHandler.

Any insight into what the problem might be? Is $kotlin_version supposed to be getting set automatically somewhere?

For reference, here’s the build.gradle that’s failing:

plugins {
    id 'com.android.application'
    id 'kotlin-android'
}

android {
    compileSdk 30

    defaultConfig {
        applicationId "dev.mfazio.pennydrop"
        minSdk 26
        targetSdk 30
        versionCode 1
        versionName "1.0"

        testInstrumentationRunner "androidx.test.runner.AndroidJUnitRunner"
    }

    buildTypes {
        release {
            minifyEnabled false
            proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android-optimize.txt'), 'proguard-rules.pro'
        }
    }
    compileOptions {
        sourceCompatibility JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8
        targetCompatibility JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8
    }
    kotlinOptions {
        jvmTarget = '1.8'
    }
}

dependencies {
    implementation fileTree(dir: "libs", include: ["*.jar"])
    implementation "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib-jdk8:$kotlin_version"
    implementation 'androidx.core:core-ktx:1.6.0'
    implementation 'androidx.appcompat:appcompat:1.3.1'
    implementation 'com.google.android.material:material:1.4.0'
    implementation 'androidx.constraintlayout:constraintlayout:2.1.0'
    testImplementation 'junit:junit:4.+'
    androidTestImplementation 'androidx.test.ext:junit:1.1.3'
    androidTestImplementation 'androidx.test.espresso:espresso-core:3.4.0'
}