quick hack to get the same deps in project.clj from deps.edn (only works with mvn/version obviously): project.clj:

(def deps-edn '{:deps {org.clojure/clojure {:mvn/version "1.10.2-rc1"}
                       medley/medley {:mvn/version "1.3.0"}}})

;; or:
;; (require '[clojure.edn :as edn])
;; (def deps-edn (edn/read-string (slurp "deps.edn")))

(def project
  `{:version "0.0.1"
    :dependencies ~(mapv (fn [[lib version]]
                           [lib (:mvn/version version)])
                         (:deps deps-edn))})

(TIL: you can just def a map named project in project.clj)

There's a lein-tools-deps if you don't know :)

does it (still) work?

No reason to believe otherwise :)