The decision to make Clojure JVM based and so slow to startup has slowed it's adoption to a much more significant level than anyone in the Clojure community is willing to accept.
I find most web server applications do not require fast startup times. its only recently with the advent of serverless that it is a potential problem.
And for desktop applications, the jvm platform itself is the bigger friction, rather than slow startup times. People just didn't prefer the non-nativeness of the jvm for some reason.