So, cider-apropos-select and then hitting RET will actually do what I want. I can then interactively narrow to the function I'm interested in. Kind of weird behavior TBH. Would be much better to just skip the RET and start filtering immediately

I guess there are performance implications, but at least on this pc it is pretty much instant

See this for context https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider/issues/1541

Generally cider-apropos mirrors the standard apropos interface in Emacs.

I get that, but shouldn't the cider-apropos-select just start with the completing read, so that you can just start typing and narrow your search without having to supply an empty query first?

Ah, you mean this. I guess it was just done to be consistent with the other command. But also otherwise we’d have to dump every symbol that’s currently known which is going to be pretty slow.

That’s a general problem with commands that operate on all known symbols.