Hi, I work on Reason full time and have been managing the reason-cli releases, and I'm happy to say that we're pretty close to not needing reason-cli anymore because the much better alternative is to _avoid_ global installs and instead model IDE support and as devDependencies of your project. We only have been releasing a global install (reason-cli) because:

1) Until recently we didn't have better alternatives for BuckleScript based projects (but then Reason Language Server came along)

2) We didn't have a good way to quickly install per-project dependencies for the Reason Native workflow. But then we built esy for native workflows which makes it very fast to install large dependencies across multiple projects by using a relocatable immutable package build cache.

Now, there's much less reason to use a global install and global installs will always have the problem of conflicting with project dependencies. I think you're picking up on that fact. Here's to the sandboxed project future!

This kind of stuff is often discussed in the Discord ReasonML channel so if you're ever curious to read the pulse on the direction of dev tools, feel free to join the discussion.