I hear you, GraalVM is pretty new and while I've managed to write and deploy plenty of clis using it without any problems, it's a big hassle to deal with anything GUI or server related. So it does have a long way to go.

And while Babashka is not Clojure, it's interpreter (sci - https://github.com/borkdude/sci) is in fact a "Small Clojure Interpreter" that tries to stay as close to Clojure as possible. Unless you're using the Java interop, I've yet to hit anything I cannot do in Babashka that I could do in Clojure (I barely use Java interop)