Clojurescript is nice in principle but it's a long way away from being something a JS dev might pick up cold. The tooling is extremely complex and heavyweight IMO. I think the next step is doubling down on self-hosted CLJS, but now we have a few fragmented implementations for various cases.

Yeah, the tooling is what keeps me from using it, despite my unabashed love of Clojure in theory.

has anyone ever read a post on good and bad strategies to get to a state with good tooling for a new language? i've learned no matter how great your new language X is, unless it's magically better than old language Y + Ytools, it's going to be worse than Y+YTools. So overcoming that hump is a big challenge, and I'm wondering if there are strategic or tactical methods that work better than others

does 'Worse is better' count? https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html