Hmm, funny, it seems that you can overwrite alias in some cases and can’t in other cases. I’ve played with this:

iex> alias Asdf.Qwer
Asdf.Qwer
iex> Qwer
Asdf.Qwer

# still not working
iex> alias Qwer
Asdf.Qwer
iex> alias Qwer, as: Qwer
Asdf.Qwer

# this works?
iex> alias Foo, as: Qwer
Foo
iex> Qwer
Foo

# this also works
iex> alias Bar.Qwer
Bar.Qwer
iex> Qwer
Bar.Qwer

# funnily, this seemed to work at first glance (but really doesn't)
iex> alias Elixir.Qwer
Qwer # refers Qwer, yeay!
iex> Qwer
Bar.Qwer # it reverts, the alias doesn't work.

This is a bug. Can you please file a bug report?

Is closing and reopening the shell (or via respawn) not a viable solution? (basically it will clear all bound variables and aliases in the shell.)

Since you use alias which is alias Asdf.Qwer, you can refer to the original Qwer using Elixir. Call it like this Elixir.Qwer.

Yeah, I can confirm this. I also just playing around with alias in IEx with the same result as yours.