One of my heresy's is I think things like classpaths are an antipattern. In that determining the location of files and other resources should be a separate process. One that's explicit and debuggable.

Funny enough, that's exactly why the Clojure community created deps.edn [0]. - optional dependencies - use JARs on disk, local projects that build JARs, or Maven Central - pull in code from git repo via url and git hash or tag ("git dependencies") - different variations for the above for different targets (run, test, integration-test, etc.)

[0]: https://clojure.org/guides/deps_and_cli