I often use delay or promise for top level def that aren't constant to avoid that problem.

That is also good practice for graalvm-native compiled Clojure

Is there a way to see which deps you don’t currently have in your local .m2 . My goal is just to see out of all the deps I need, which would need to be downloaded.

No, that's not a feature right now

To get that answer you would at least need to download all the poms