It can be helpful to have a separate profile of IntelliJ when working on AndroidX as we use prebuilts of an SDK instead of public SDK. Launching IntelliJ with a custom idea.properties files allows to have a separate profile of IntelliJ for work with AndroidX.
To use this launch IntelliJ with setting STUDIO_PROPERTIES env variable to point to idea.properties in this checkout that sets custom idea.config.path and idea.system.path. sample-androidx-canary.desktop is an example Linux desktop shortcut entry.