Why do I need to have shadow-cljs dependency when building for release? Is this intended? I am using deps.edn and shadow, and I didn't include the shadow-cljs in my release alias, and it failed to build.

that is a weird question? not sure I understand what you mean? yes, you do need shadow-cljs to build a release build, it is building that build after all?

ah I guess the npm shadow-cljs package confused you. that is in fact only doing the CLI things. the actual building is done by the thheller/shadow-cljs dependency you have in deps.edn

the npm package does no building at all

you also don't really need to make a release alias for dependencies for a CLJS build