Bring JavaSteam to Java 8

[LossyDragon]

Description

This is quite a chunky PR, but I'll explain the changes below since the commits are so closely tied together.

1. Update Gradle to 7.6. We're almost a whole major release behind with gradle 8 milestones coming out as of this pr.
2. Update dependencies to much newer versions. This also fixes some CVE's from protocolbuffers. Also added links to each dependency.
3. Start targeting Java 8. Java 7 is nice and all, but it's getting end of life and Java 8 brings more features and syntactic sugar (like lambdas!) for when the code base is looked through and updated accordingly. This will also help bring it to newer jdk versions when the time comes.
4. Update Readme to reflect changes.

Note: @Longi94 Gradle/Maven changed the way it can upload artifacts within gradle. I believe I got most of the migration done with the new publish-plugin. But I cannot test properly. (Does the pom need to be signed too?!)

Closes #199

Checklist

• Code compiles correctly
• All tests passing
• Samples run successfully
• Extended the README / documentation, if necessary

[LossyDragon]

If merged, this will be able to cleanup an outdated dependancy; pl.pragmatists:JUnitParams:1.1.1, since Junit 5 can do Enum paramater testing

Done with c1f0e51

[LossyDragon]

This will also check off PR 1073 in #181 via commit da4836d

[LossyDragon]

I was able to upload a snapshot using ./gradlew publishToSonatype