The slow start times are meaningless for long lived servers, which Clojure is best suited for. For fast startup time there is now Babashka which is great for many tasks, and GraalVM as another option.

By leaky, I assume you are refering to the interop with the host platform. Overall, this seems like a benefit, simply for having access to many more libraries than would otherwise exist in Clojure(script).

> Clojure brings all the XML pain of Java dependencies

Do you mean pom.xml?

> better VM

The JVM seems extremely powerful with regards to performance and memory management, with 20+ years of backwards compatibility (mostly), and improvements still being made with GC and JIT.

You don't have to use pom.xml for Clojure projects. The default, included-with-the-clojure-cli support to define your dependencies in deps.edn makes dependency management extremely simple

  ;deps.edn
  {:deps {org.postgresql/postgresql {:mvn/version "42.4.0"}}}