I'm one of those mainstream devs (who also did Clojure for 6 years, coincidentally) who never got into emacs, and always just used the Cursive IDE plugin for IntelliJ and its Parinfer editing mode. I know I probably didn't unlock true god mode of productivity, but it worked fine for me.
I had already used vim by the time I found clojure during uni (back when I had the energy to learn major new things), but vim support sucked for things like evaluating code blocks in the buffer, so I tried emacs and immediately slapped on evil-mode (vim bindings inside emacs).
For those six years I don't think I used emacs keybindings during that time except to move between files and execute clojure code. I couldn't be arsed to learn it. It was basically a fancier vim, haha.
These days I use VSCode for all software. At some point in my 20s I found out there's life outside of coding so now I use a less esoteric editor. I'm sure its clojure / nrepl / paredit / parinfer support is fine. (Seems to be this: https://calva.io/) Back in 2010 the options weren't as great.
I'm the same, always just used parinfer with IntelliJ, though I do know a few paredit key combos that I use occasionally (paredit isn't disabled just because parinfer is enabled).
