In this case, I think it's meaningful. If you take https://github.com/scotthaleen/clojure-spring-cloud as a reasonable example of what that would look like, it's (subjectively) ugly as sin. Because you're operating outside idiomatic clojure, there's a lot of incidental complexity and "why would you do it that way?" moments that you wouldn't get with any of the clojure-native, idiomatic web libraries. Yes, you could wrap a lot of it behind more idiomatic facades, but that's still added work you just don't want to have to do.