I use app-admin/ansible which depends on dev-python/netaddr. netaddr pulls ipython and all its deps (more than 60 packages) by default, because of the default enabled "cli" use flag. Would it make sense to make "cli" not a default for dev-python/netaddr to avoid pulling all these 60+ deps? I imagine cli use of netaddr is a rather special use case, but this is obviously a decision the package maintainer has to make.
I was surprised to find this large number of dependencies, noticed cli flag does nothing useful and found this bug. I'm with the bug reporter. Please remove it being default. See also https://devmanual.gentoo.org/general-concepts/use-flags/ (mentions that it USE flags shouldn't be used for runtime dependencies.)