SigningConfig “release” is missing required property “storePassword”

So recently I'm experiencing the following error when running gradlew assembleRelease on my RN App:

SigningConfig “release” is missing required property “storePassword”.

To this date, I've already released a lot of versions of my app, but this started to happen recently in both my CI (Github) and locally.

My file keystore.properties is at the android root folder and configured with the proper values.

Besides that, my app/build.gradle also seems to be correct:

    signingConfigs {
        releaseStaging {
            storeFile file(‘../keystores/liber-student-app.jks’)
            storePassword keystoreProperties[‘SIGNING_KEYSTORE_PASSWORD’]
            keyAlias keystoreProperties[‘SIGNING_KEY_ALIAS’]
            keyPassword keystoreProperties[‘SIGNING_KEY_PASSWORD’]
        }
        release {
            storeFile file(‘../keystores/liber-student-app.jks’)
            storePassword keystoreProperties[‘SIGNING_KEYSTORE_PASSWORD’]
            keyAlias keystoreProperties[‘SIGNING_KEY_ALIAS’]
            keyPassword keystoreProperties[‘SIGNING_KEY_PASSWORD’]
        }
    }

I also tried hardcoding the storePassword values (as suggested in this other stackoverflow question), but that didn't work (exact same error)

I've stuck on this for the past 2 days, so please, help, thanks.