I think things have changed for Clojure since you tried to learn it. You definitely never need to worry about POM or Maven. Now, you still need to learn about

I think things have changed for Clojure since you tried to learn it. You definitely never need to worry about POM or Maven. Now, you still need to learn about a package manager and possibly a build tool. So substitute learning Maven for one of the Clojure ones: tools.deps, Leiningen, or Boot. But I mean, you had to learn NPM one day as well no? And eventually Grunt or something like it, and WebPack, etc. Learning about a language's package manager and build tool is part of any learning of any language. But yes, if you already knew NPM and using ShadowCljs does mean you save yourself that part. I'm not convinced that learning about how the JVM loads dependencies, gets packaged as Jars or UberJars, and how to use tools.deps or lein is any harder than what other languages force you to learn. So you're probably right in assuming the main issue is documentation not being tailored to very beginners.