newlisper
With no libraries, modern JS makes being "diligent about immutability (as the article puts it)" straight forward, making the benefits of something like Clojure very small and not worth it for the majority of projects. Having immutability by default pales in comparison to the benefits of using mainstream languages with big ecosystems IMO.
They just copy their init.el/vimrc to the server, Emacs/Vim users have been able to do this (coding on remote environments without all the kludges) since forever ;) and personally, I find it superior to vscoce's remote plugin since your editor and tools sit on the same machine.
For GUI editors, I agree that vscode's remote development extension is a killer feature and nothing can't match it today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_data_structure
Maybe GC is just a lot better than I think.
Yes, Clojure relies heavily on the JVM's GC being very good. It trashes it like there is no tomorrow and it would be a lot of work and extremely hard for an implementation of Clojure from scratch to match the performance of Clojure in the JVM because of how good the JVM's GC is.
Having said that, I have move 3 projects (10k-20k LoC) to JS from Clojure and don't plan creating new ones in Clojure, the JS projects ended up being faster, shorter and easier to understand. Idiomatic Clojure is very slow, as soon as you want to squeeze any little performance out it your code base will get ugly really fast. Learning Clojure is nice for the insights but I'll will pick nodejs first any day for new projects. Even if I need the JVM, my first choice probably will be Kotlin and then Clojure.
Of course there are many more downsides to using Clojure. No ecosystem, the cognitive overhead of doing interop with over-abstracted over-engineered Java libraries(because of no ecosystem ;)), the horrible startup times, the cultist community and the interop is really not that good, sometimes you have to write a Java wrapper over the Java lib to make it usable from Clojure. The benefits over JS are minimal but the overhead and downsides are too much. Worth learning it but not worth using it for real production projects.