Somehow a language designed from scratch with all the purported wisdom of Lisp ended up with a nastier import solution than JavaScript, which had none out of the box for its first two decades of life, and then had to reconcile as many as 5 different module systems.
Also Clojure is doing just fine, not sure what you mean by "dying". The core and the tooling continue to improve, there are lots of libraries, more people writing than ever. I just don't see this death you're describing.
The comments here just strike me as ignorant and incoherent as a whole. Why do people who clearly have no experience actually trying to do something in Clojure have so much to say about it?
Clojure may support things that look daunting to you, but if you actually had any goal other than critiquing the variety of things you actually have no use for, you would not have the difficulties you describe.
Maybe I'm spoiled, I remember JDK setup being a pain on Windows a decade ago when I used it last, if that's the problem then I get it. My spoiled experience on a system with a functioning package manager is basically install-and-go, and zero configuration required to get CIDER going after that.
I just don't get what's so bad about it, it's basically the same experience as Rust with Cargo; is that another "nasty" experience? What language with package manager has a better experience?
Getting started in Clojure is not a nightmare, ordinary people do it all the time, the fact that somebody said it was a nightmare says very little.
Clojure's mechanism for requiring packages is far from byzantine, whether you "budge" on that or not; many Clojure libraries have the snippet for including the current stable release of that library at the top of their README on GitHub. It isn't matter of "sticking with it" or "figuring out something that works for you", it is literally one relatively simple piece of knowledge that is learned once and works forever.
In short, if you find namespaces and importing byzantine in Clojure, you are probably at the level of struggling to write fizzbuzz in any language. The fact that there are features other than :require in ns does not indicate that :require is complicated, it just indicates that ns has features.