Yeah, there's been some work for speeding up clj running on the regular JVM, but I find it never really gets much interest. I think most people use clj for stuff like web services that are long running, and locally develop via the REPL so restarts aren't common.

One project worth watching is Jank, it aims to be mostly compatible but running on LLVM, still not quite production ready, but seems to have some community funding and being developed pretty actively https://jank-lang.org/