@yuvipanda ^

yuvipanda is used as the destination in other places in the alias file, like as a member of root@ and stuff like that. so that would have to be changed too (?) and Yuvipanda said he doesn't like the "pandian" variant....hmm

I don't think it has to fully resolve inside exim..

eg. khorn isn't defined itself inside the exim config, but I'm fairly confident it's still delivering to her address on google..

That (@JKrauska's comment) is correct — exim does recursive expansion of aliases. Referencing a Google address on the root@ alias is fine.