does deps-deploy work only with clojars? why would I use that instead of pemgranate ? I'm asking because I would like to publish to a private maven repo (Sonatype nexus) and don't know what to pick

I was checking out tools.build sources and I noticed the slf4j implementation there org.slf4j/slf4j-nop {:mvn/version "1.7.25"} . I believe that should not be set for a library in deps. IMO the library should only depend on slf4j-api and use an implementation only in test aliases or similar. My recommendation for such cases is to use org.slf4j/slf4j-simple {:mvn/version "1.7.25"} :

:test {:extra-paths ["src/test/clojure"]
         :extra-deps {io.github.cognitect-labs/test-runner
                      {:git/url ""
                       :sha "705ad25bbf0228b1c38d0244a36001c2987d7337"}
                      org.slf4j/slf4j-simple {:mvn/version "1.7.25"}}

In this case tools.build is designed to be used as an application and generally I don’t find the logging to be of much use

If it was not included here, every user of tools.build would have to include a log impl

Yeah, I think it's reasonable to require someone to exclude the log impl if they want a different one.