They're nice, but they're not the same thing.

The threading macros are (as I understand it) pure sugar.

Turning (-> (gather my-list) uppercase-list sort) into (sort (uppercase-list (gather my-list))).

In contrast to, say, Java (I can't speak to the code above):

        List<Things> things = thingIds.stream()
                .map(model::findThing)
                .filter(Objects::nonNull)
                .toList();

These are streamed. This is pretty much a pipe structure, whereas the threading macros will create a lot of temporary copies of the data (I don't know if that's a universal truth). That is, if you're processing a 1000 items, say `gather` returns a 1000 items, that 1000 item list is passed to `uppercase-list` which return a new 1000 item list to feed to `sort` which returns another 1000 item list (assuming none of these are destructive).

I wish CL had something like the Java streams (maybe it does).