I got it working using this... but now I keep getting "could not create shim" error

Just an idea (you may have tried this already): To debug this, it may be worth checking that everything is working correctly with the IDE first. (e.g. create deps.edn file with a text file editor and run the the commands in the command line directly). If all that is working then switch to setting up the IDE.

From my understanding, deps.clj is apparently more reliable on Windows than Clojure proper. I cannot vouch for that, since I never attempted Clojure directly on Windows. Unless I had a very good reason otherwise, I would just spin up WSL and run it there. https://github.com/borkdude/deps.clj https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

Managed to get it working. Running it in cli gave me a better error and I realised that one of my dpendencies for deps was partially downloaded. Deleting contents of .m2 and reinstalling worked!