Clojure is just really niche. Even an ecosystem that stays the same size overtime is dwarfed by the continually growing, continually polished competitor ecosystems that will pull people from the small niches.

The best things about Clojure are things you don't really appreciate until you've already done the work to learn them.

For example, I never would have known how amazing it was to evaluate code inside the editor until I did the work of learning Emacs + evil-mode + nrepl/cider + whatever so that I could spin up my http server in-process and then modify code without restarting everything. Even today I'm doing `nodemon index.ts` like a goofball.

I stopped using Clojure simply when I met someone who wanted to build some big projects with me and, despite appreciating that Clojure was probably amazing, they simply couldn't be bothered to learn it. Fair enough. It was when Javascript was just getting `yield` coroutines (before async/await) which finally made Javascript bearable for me enough to switch to it for server work.

Clojure just has increasingly compelling languages and ecosystems to compete with, yet it has a huge ramp up, being a lisp, that make it hard for people to choose it.

Just consider how, to even write Clojure comfortably, you really need something like Paredit. Else, what exactly are you going to do if you want to nest or unnest a (form) deeper in the ast structure? Manually rebalance parens? Cut and paste it? Only Paredit lets you easily move a (form) around the ast. And it's amazing but yet another tool you have to learn just to truly evaluate Clojure.