Leiningen and deps.edn shield you a bit from the awfulness of Java project management. They feel a lot more like something you'd see in Node.js or something, but it still gets dependencies from Maven Central.

Debugging and profiling is still somewhat Java based, and yeah that's can be irritating, but you get used to it.

Personally I do think that it's worth it; Clojure is a very pleasant language that has no business being as fast as it is, and core.async is an absolutely lovely concurrency framework if you can convert your logic into messaging, and you have Haskell-style transactional memory for stuff that can't be. So many problems become less irritating in Clojure.

Is clj-boot still a thing or was it ever a thing?

It or or was a build tool like Leiningen.