VS Code and its forks (Cursor, Antigravity, etc.) have Calva, a fantastic REPL with excellent linter Kondo. These are amazing tools; formatting is the very least of it. You don't need Emacs. I personally using VS Code + Doom Emacs. Also, many packages that look abandoned are simply mature. You can literally use ten year old packages.

I'm not a hot shot programmer, entirely self-taught but a decent architect who thinks hard about problems, and with LLM agents Clojure shines for me. There are some fantastic databases also starting with Datomic -- free now thanks to Nubank -- and everything inspired by it and the Clojure flavor of Datalog. These include Datalevin, Datahike, DataScript, XTDB. Datomic itself is probably best for enterprise though there's now an embedded version.

But I'm pretty convinced that most LLMs I've used are more reliable with Clojure (and Elixir) than with most of the popular languages, and I can say they use Datalog extremely well, seemingly much better than SQL despite the vast difference in corpus size. For one thing Datalog just gets rid of joins issues.