Before you start discussing whether a language is "slow", check if perhaps it is "fast enough".
Apart from trying not to write stupid code, I don't even optimize anymore, because coupled with ridiculously fast servers (bare-metal hardware from Hetzner in my case), it's a waste of time. Things run great, and I'd much rather invest in building complex app features that customers will pay for, and have flexible living code that I can easily rearchitect as needed.
The last time I had to optimize Clojure code was when I wrote a search engine that had to respond to incremental searches in a fairly large E-commerce product databases. But that was also about 12 years ago, so computers were quite a bit slower, and JVMs were not as good as they are today.
I do tend to use transducers quite a bit, because they provide great composability and structure the code nicely, while providing a good performance boost as well (you avoid creating lots of intermediate data structures, which not only saves CPU, but also reduces cache, memory and GC usage) — but I don't worry about performance too much. It's just not a problem that appears on the radar.