I think most of your issues really come down to not embracing or understanding a proper clojure(script) workflow and/or not really understanding the tooling that currently exists.

I double checked the date of this article to make sure this wasn't written 6 months ago and posted now.

You should check out the clojurians slack channel, there you can probably get good answers for 85% of the things that are holding you back.

Good luck with it, using clojure/script + cursive clojure + intellij has been the best development experience I've had in 18 years of professional coding! It's 110% worth the investment.