Everyone who has exa installed and setup aliases now has to uninstall, install a new tool, and edit their workflows.

exa is dead. People can move to yet another ls replacement, but they can't stay on exa.

You could stay on the current version of exa and likely not have an issue for years down the road.

This seems to heavily exaggerate the problem IMHO. Most sane people don't replace any of the basic tools like exa on critical infra that is expected to be low maintenance. Exa is a tool you install in terminals you personally use, purely for your personal comfort. And due to this situation it needs to be manually updated to a new name/new source, it's a one time operation. Surely not ideal, but hardly an unsurmountable obstacle. People using tools like this aren't exactly the sort of audience that is unfamiliar with having to install/uninstall a package.

Everyone who has exa installed can continue to use it as long as desired.