Some Clojure frameworks and libs do provide REPL support for things that we would otherwise expect to be CLIs, such as running migrations, (re-)starting service

Some Clojure frameworks and libs do provide REPL support for things that we would otherwise expect to be CLIs, such as running migrations, (re-)starting services and so on. The startup time criticism is valid, but in context of development you typically don’t restart it except you pull in deps (very rare) or something terrible happens (rare). Then, there is also borkdude/babashka which is a Clojure powered scripting tool with fast startup times due to GraalVM.