Something being "more recent" doesn't necessarily make it better :-)

I use leiningen, too. I tried other approaches, but had trouble getting them to do everything that I need (for example, AOT compilation of the entire code that goes into the final .jar), and I couldn't really see any massive advantages.

deps is more flexible, but I you just want to run a repl, build and deploy code then lein still works fine.

I usually default to leiningen: I can't be arsed to spend time configuring deps to do what lein does out of the box. (For example: building an uberjar)

I was lost when I moved to deps from lein, but just forking and cloning https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn as $HOME/.clojure solved the problem - this base deps.edn contained all the aliases I needed - creating a new project, searching and adding dependencies, hooking up data inspectors like portal or reveal, testing, code coverage, benchmarking, building uberjar etc. Moving to deps also introduced me to polylith [1], which has been very useful for building large multi-component projects

[1] https://polylith.gitbook.io/polylith/

To me it is kind off crazy when a build tools needs some 3rd party config library to make it usable.