It feels like the Clojure community is kind of withering. Or maybe it's just perpetually stuck in the Lisp niche.

Interesting observation... not sure I get that from the Clojure community or from looking around.

Last year Clojure made it to #1 (2019), improving from #3 (2018) in the SO salary cahrts.

(https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#top-paying-te... vs https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#top-paying-te...)

I've been teaching myself Clojurescript for the past three months, and while this might, in theory, be a good idea someday, the state of the Clojurescript tooling and learning materials I've used means that it is certainly not a good idea today.

Too much friction and incidental complexity for a kid, they will have to be familiar with JS anyway.

Why? Even as a professional developer, it’s extremely unusual that my cljs work requires any JS familiarity. I don’t see why a complete beginner would even need to know that JS exists.