Clojure would not gain widespread adoption even if all your points were fixed. The sad reality is that 99% of developers out there are instantly turned off by the parens and absence of while loops.
Clojure for a Lisp dialect has already gained quite some adoption. I like Lisp, and of course, I would love to see Lisp being used everywhere and used more. But honestly, if someone asked me ten years ago if Clojure would ever become more popular than languages like OCaml, Haskell or Scala, I would've said: "very few people would probably know that such language has ever existed." I'm not trying to bash on other PLs, the popularity of any language is difficult to measure, and it is a very subjective topic. Still, today Clojure has lots of conferences, and the number is growing every year, several active podcasts, tons of (relevant and up to date) books, jobs (that no matter how many, never will be enough), meetups, etc.
I'm seeing Clojure related posts on top of HN almost every week. And I'm watching people trying Clojure, coming with all sorts of different backgrounds. I have worked with people who came to Clojure from C++, Ruby, Python, C#, Haskell, Go, Scala, OCaml, JavaScript, CL; people with no programming experience at all.
Of course, that all is incomparable with the craze that something like Typescript receives. And I used to feel anxious, worried that this would be the last ever job where I happily used Clojure. But after my third job where Clojure was the primary language, I stopped sweating about that.
I think Clojure, at this point, has stabilized in the industry and slowly and steadily would continue to attract people. The only thing that can genuinely kill Clojure - is a better version of its fork.
I don't worry about Clojure's future either. I think it'll stay strong for at least another ten years, and it's hard to see beyond that for any language. I use it professionally, and would strongly consider it if I was founding a startup.
But as you say, it's popular "for a Lisp dialect" and I don't expect it to reach past that. I would love to be proven wrong.
That being said, your post made me realize that instead of lamenting the nicheness of Lisps, I should be encouraging other people to give Clojure a shot. And not only to help Clojure be more successful, but also to bring a little bit of joy to their daily life like Clojure often does. (It sounds trite but it's true.)
Ha, I did run into that one. Take my upvote! Clojure's while is very rarely used so hopefully my point still stands, especially when languages like Go have been wildly successful going in the exact opposite direction.
Clojure has while loops, but I think I see where you're coming from: It is a significantly different approach to programming, and if an engineer is not willing to re-jigger their style Clojure is not going to be a good fit for them.
