is there any way to upgrade the cider package without upgrading everything else? my spacemacs installation breaks if I try a full package upgrade

hm nevermind, upgrading to emacs 26.3 fixed my problems

For future reference, you can remove the package and restart - M-x package-delete. Spacemacs will install a new version of the package on boot.

Theoretically you should be able to use M-x package-reinstall, but in practice it's unreliable, so just clear it out and let Spacemacs handle the re-download.

@euccastro if you do find a package that you don't want to upgrade, you can always add it to dotspacemacs-frozen-packages