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.