not a 'direct' way, but I can get the file/line info as per cider-find-var, and read the file and sexpr myself. wasn't hard!

There used to be a command that returned the source as string, but we removed it at some point, as it seemed cider-find-var was what most people actually needed.

Seems fine, feature bloat is a burden. But I was missing something like cider-find-file but that only does string parsing - no side-effects. Probably cider-find-file should be split, so one can use those primitives independently.