In my policy of forming sudoers file I'm using aliases pointing to specific binaries and the group them using another alias by their function, like this:

Cmnd_Alias GREP = /bin/grep
Cmnd_Alias MISC_UTILS = GREP

Sudo works properly with rules formed that way but visudo issues a warning stating that aliases like GREP in given example are unused. It does not complain about aliases like MISC_UTILS since they are used directly when specifying user capabilities e.g.

MAINTAINERS ALL = (root) MISC_UTILS

MAINTAINERS is User_Alias.

I'm not sure about that but I wasn't able to notice such behavior with previous versions of visudo.

Is the mentioned behavior introduced purposedly? If it is could you kindly reconsider it?