if these are Clojure tests (not clojurescript tests) then you do not need to have the test-paths in deps.edn, just configure them in tests.edn and they will be added to the classpath

(might still be useful to have them in deps.edn for e.g. REPL use, but it's not necessary for kaocha)

so yeah you can quite easily create a tests.edn file that includes the tests from all the sub-projects. Alternatively having a plugin to handle this sort of parent/child repo scenario would be a great addition to the kaocha ecosystem. Remember it's all just data, just a matter of reading the different tests.edn files and deciding how to merge them into a single config.