I'm not sure if the Lisp Curse can in fact be easily applied to Clojure. Clojure projects, for some reason (in my opinion), don't suffer as much as projects in other Lisps - such as Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp. Maybe it's because of the hosted nature of the language, there's usually a good set of libraries to choose from for Java and Javascript, and my guess is that this would hold true for ClojureDart and ClojureCLR as well.

You can typically find some Clojure/Clojurescript wrappers if you want to interact with a JVM or Javascript library. But if a wrapper doesn't do what you need, you can always use interop directly.

Also, Clojurists tend to adhere to some good stylistic defaults. They try not to overcomplicate things without good reasons. Furthermore, the nature of the language forces you to keep things small and simple.

I think having to mention the other ecosystems shows some aspect of the problem.

Maybe unrelated (but seemed like a symptom): In my case putting together a web framework was not trivial, as there was no equivalent to Django or Rails. Instead it seemed I was going to have to put together every piece of the stack - I loved it but it was not productive. Deciding between integrant/component, ring/compojure/reitit, etc was easy once you took a bit of time to read code and try it out but the furthest from 'just run it and keep going by tweaking'.

I haven't given up yet, will give it another try this xmas break. I do believe there's huge productivity gains in a repl-driven clojure workflow.