Thanks for the pointers. Trampolining is an old idea for obtaining tail-calls. It's a kind of folk-wisdom that has been rediscovered many times, as the related work here shows:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/317636.317779

Usually the trampoline is implemented automatically by the language rather than forcing the author to confront it, though I can see why Clojure might have chosen to put the burden on the user.

Yeah, Rich's HOPL lecture covers that ground...

https://clojure.org/about/history

  > Clojure is not the product of traditional research
  > and (as may be evident) writing a paper for this setting 
  > was a different and challenging exercise.
  > I hope the paper provides some insight into why 
  > Clojure is the way it is and the process and people
  > behind its creation and development.