Most (but not all) of our components use a branch-alias definition for Composer. This ticket aims to serve as a discussion basis whether it actually makes sense to keep these.

IMHO having a branch-alias is a real PITA, as it provides very little value and often ends up getting out of sync with the branch.

As an alternative, I would suggest dropping the definitions and using an inline alias as required:

$ composer require "react/socket-client:dev-master as 0.5.0"