Thanks to @alexyakushev for writing in-depth about Clojure performance (among other things). I learn a lot every time.
e.g. ... At this moment, I happened to be reading the https://clojure-goes-fast.com/blog/clojures-deadly-sin/ and was reminded of https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/C053AK3F9/p1712948821953339 where laziness bit someone trying to process files. In that thread, my brain was telling me "there's probably a doall missing", but that was programmer's intuition... now I have a concrete and much better mental model of why that bug occurred (releasing resources + doall's behaviour + probably difference between REPL invocation while the were testing, and compiled program runtime behaviour).
Big thanks to @cfleming for jumping on my peculiar request to get direnv support in Cursive!
If anyone has a similar need, you can find the thread here: https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/C0744GXCJ/p1719936259894199