Yeah, Clojure is not great for CLIs, but pretty much every other use case it excels at. For CLIs, there is always Babashka (
https://babashka.org/) which works good enough.
For local development, you usually just compile+eval one function at a time as you change them, and those happens under 1ms, not enough to even notice (unless you develop with a remote REPL, but then network is to blame)
For server usage, you usually compile once in CI and put the resulting binary/JAR on the server. A few seconds for startup matters less in those cases.
The drama of slow Clojure startup is wildly overblown, because basically for no other use case than writing CLIs, does the startup time matter so much it becomes a problem.
For local development, you usually just compile+eval one function at a time as you change them, and those happens under 1ms, not enough to even notice (unless you develop with a remote REPL, but then network is to blame)
For server usage, you usually compile once in CI and put the resulting binary/JAR on the server. A few seconds for startup matters less in those cases.
The drama of slow Clojure startup is wildly overblown, because basically for no other use case than writing CLIs, does the startup time matter so much it becomes a problem.