Yeah CLJS REPLs are a pain point currently (if you use Cursive specifically) Emacs and Atom and some others are much easier, that said a lot of people start with the hot code reloading since that experience is really nice and works out the box for Shadow-cljs or Figwheel
Then eventually set up their REPLs, I know Cursive is working on this though and the nice thing there is you always have access to the "standard library" provided by the Google Closure compiler all of JS and then all of CLJS and all of npm and all of CLJS's libraries
Once I was set up I quickly became effective, though I do tend to stay within the bounds of Cljs and avoid the host where I can.