JFrog Artifactory returns 404 when trying to PUT a new file with maven 'publishing' plugin

Question

My maven publishing task suddenly started to fail after being successful for more than a year, i am trying to upload an artifact with Gradle's maven 'publish' plugin.
The repository declaration in build.gradle

maven {
          name "artifactorySnapshot"
          url "https://artifactory.HOSTNAME/artifactory/libs-snapshot-local"
          credentials {
            username = System.getenv("ARTIFACTORY_USERNAME")
            password = System.getenv("ARTIFACTORY_PASSWORD")
          }
        } 

The publication declaration:

publishing {
  publications {
    publicLib(MavenPublication) {
      afterEvaluate {
          groupId "groupId"
          artifactId archivesBaseName
          version = 1.0
          artifacts [/path/to/jarfile.jar]
      }
    }
  }
}

Task invokation:

  sh "./gradlew :module:submodule:publishPublicLibPublicationToArtifactorySnapshotRepository

I get the following:

 Could not PUT 'https://artifactory.HOSTNAME/artifactory/libs-snapshot/path/to/jar.jar'. Received status code 404 from server: Not Found

The frustrating part is that this used to work and just broke all of the sudden.
When i try to upload a testfile manually with curl from the same Jenkins slave node i can do it without problems (i use the same user and pass):

curl -v --user user:pass--data-binary @test.txt -X PUT "https://artifactory.HOSTNAME/artifactory/libs-snapshot-local/path/to/jar.jar"

This returns 200 and i see the test file uploaded.

And the "Hide existence of unauthorized resources" in Artifactory admin is unchecked.
Does anyone have any idea how i could possibly solve this?