I find that Babashka has completely solved the problem for cases where I need fast startup with Clojure. I've been using it for all my scripting, and it works fantastic.

The best part is that you can develop it interactively via the REPL the same way as regular Clojure. You just run bb --nrepl-server and connect an editor to it. Calva with VS Code works great for this incidentally.