> Clojure is capable of producing some of the most dense code I’ve ever seen, so manual code reviews really start to feel like

For me it's the opposite, the dense code is easier to review, because the proposed changes are almost always smaller and more informative. Contrast a change in a typical TypeScript project where changes propagate across tens of files, that you need to jump in-between just to understand the context. In the time it takes me to ramp up understanding what the change is, I've already completed the review of a change in a Clojure program.

I would say dense code tends to help code reviews. It just is a bit unintuitive to spend minutes looking at a page of code when you are used to take a few seconds in more verbose languages.

I find it also easier to just grab the code and interactively play with it compared to do that with 40 pages of code.