I havent used Datomic for ages and havent actually used Datomic Ions, although I like the architecture of that approach. It does seem a lot of code for what I believe is just 3 Clojure command lines - well it seems like its one command with three different options passed :woman-shrugging:

I would prefer to run these deploy and status commands in a terminal window anyway.

There has been a significant update to the automatic-highlightsymbol Emacs package and it is causing symbol highlighting to be on by default in all modes. This is a change to the default behaviour in Spacemacs which has this mode switched off. My fix was to copy the original auto-highlight-symbol-20210108.1841 package from the ~/.emacs.d/.cache/rollback/<emacs-version>/develop directory to ~/.emacs.d/elpa/<emacs-version>/develop directory and move or delete the newer package. There is an issue on Spacemacs discussing other options and if not using the symbol highlight transient menu key bindings, # and * then you can remove the hooks for automatic-highlight-symbol mode https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/issues/14880