I sincerely want to know what I am missing, because the fact that Clojure is hosted on the JVM (mainly) seems like a plus to me.
I don't much like the build tools in the jvm environment such as maven or gradle, and the error messages could be better for sure. Is there more ugliness that I should look into?
Besides - Clojure is not JVM-only, Clojure is a hosted language, it can work a top of different platforms: JS engine - Clojurescript; Flutter - ClojureDart; Native Code scripting - Babashka; NodeJS - nbb; .Net - Clojure CLR; Fennel even though technically is not a Clojure, is a lovely little language very similar to it and it works on Lua. There's also jank-lang, currently in development that works on top of LLVM. There are a bunch of other Clojure dialects - for Rust, Go, Python, Erlang, etc.