If you use clojure-mcp/clojure-mcp-light that problem goes away, and that gives it the ability to run a repl and work from it directly. It’s night and day.
Clojure will be around as long as the jvm. It’s mostly done at the core level, most updates are to leverage new host features nowadays. The rest is happily provided at the library level by the community (which is still very prolific).
And it’s not tied to the jvm per say, look at clojurescript (and derivatives) or the upcoming jank.
It’s far from dead. As much as I like CL, the ecosystem is a bit of a desert compared to the jvm.