Android gradle exclude does not work as expected

I am developing a React Native project and am using a third party library react-native-geolocation-service. Inside the build.gradle file of that library, the version of play-services-location is defined as so: (refer to this link for the entire build.gradle file)

dependencies {
    def googlePlayServicesVersion = rootProject.hasProperty('googlePlayServicesVersion') ? rootProject.googlePlayServicesVersion : DEFAULT_GOOGLE_PLAY_SERVICES_VERSION

    implementation "com.google.android.gms:play-services-location:$googlePlayServicesVersion"
}

Inside the build.gradle file of my project, I have the following:

buildscript {
    ext {
        ...
        googlePlayServicesVersion = "16.1.0"
    }
}

Inside the app/build.gradle file of my project:

dependencies {
    implementation(project(':react-native-geolocation-service')) {
        exclude group: 'com.google.android.gms', module: 'play-services-location'
    }
    implementation ('com.google.android.gms:play-services-location:16.0.0') {
      force = true
    }
}

Even though I have specified in the gradle file to use version 16.0.0 for play-services-location, I still get the following error after I ran gradlew clean then gradlew build:

Execution failed for task ':react-native-geolocation-service:generateDebugRFile'.

Could not resolve all files for configuration ':react-native-geolocation-service:debugRuntimeClasspath'.

Could not find com.google.android.gms:play-services-location:16.1.0.

Why is gradle still looking for version 16.1.0 and not version 16.0.0?