I think of it this way: keywords are like symbols, but they survive serialization/deserialization and macroexpansion intact, so you don't need to be extra caref

I think of it this way: keywords are like symbols, but they survive serialization/deserialization and macroexpansion intact, so you don't need to be extra careful with quoting to prevent automatic evaluation of the symbol to some other value. And since keywords are used in code very often as keys and enums, it reduces cognitive load immensely.