Aliases for all entities

Aliases are a great addition and I expect these to be used for many purposes. Therefore it is important that all entities can have aliases.
Currently, aliases can only be associated via the UI. While this is nice and user friendly, it becomes tedious when you have packages with large number of (template) sensors etc. For these it would be friendly if the aliases could be set with the definition in the package. For example

template:
  - sensor:
      - name: Bresser51 Wind Direction
        unique_id: bresser51_wind_direction
        aliases:
          - Wind direction
    	state: ...