Aliases that depend on other aliases (who may also depend on aliases that depend on aliases....) seem a great way to add complexity to an otherwise simple approach configuration. Excludes and overrides may be needed to manage conflicts and control what is being brought in from other aliases, which would then need tooling to show what each alias is pulling in... Or aliases could be kept simple, declarative and composable on the command line (it's for a CLI after all). I hope this is the path that is kept.

Since writing that ticket I started using babashka to create my ~/.clojure/deps.edn file and this solves the developer experience issue for me. It's another layer to deal with but it works. Keeping complexity out of the lower layers is probably a good idea.