LLVM doesn't prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot via a dozen different language details completely divorced from backend implementation. It's only a small, but very important and difficult, aspect of compiler writing. I think languages like go have demonstrated well that this is of limited benefit to the success of the language.

Racket at least provides most of the tooling required (eg dealing with details of namespacing, syntax, runtime/compile-time/evaluate-time distinction, continuations and garbage collection), but if you've ever tried to introduce it into an organization of significant size this very same result of yak-shaving will be considered a liability.

You're criticism is an apples vs. oranges strawman. LLVM IR and libraries provide powerful plumbing. It's not meant to be a turn-key or cookie-cutter solution, or inherently memory-safe VM or compiler generator. It's also not formally verified and written in C++, which adds project configuration complexity and C++ pitfalls. It's possible to plug in a custom GC using their strategy model their way, or manage GC yourself like Pony does because it's built around ORCA.