At some point HikariCP uses slf4j 2.0.0-alpha1 (see #1498), and as of writing the latest version 5.0.1 is was published to use 2.0.0-alpha1.

However seems like the HikariCP author has reverted that change in latest dev branch as the pom.xml no longer has any references to slf4j 2.x (https://github.com/brettwooldridge/HikariCP/blob/dev/pom.xml, or https://github.com/brettwooldridge/HikariCP/blob/2e07be7b325b05f7225611c60f421e253e1107a5/pom.xml at time of writing)

slf4j 2.0 upgrade should wait until HikariCP (the only library that's causing doobie to pull in slf4j) publishes a non-alpha release of slf4j 2.x