is the graal vm thang the standard in making clojure REPLs start fast or am i blurring histories

(suppose that's not a mutually exclusive collection there)

Graal VM is part of making native binaries from Clojure programs and those have fast startup. It's not about "REPLs" per se.

GraalVM native image isn’t used for JVM REPLs since those by definition are still going to invoke byte code compilation when you eval an expression. Native image assumes your already past that stage.

Perhaps you’re referring to the idea of AOTing libraries so when loading those in your REPL you have to do less work each time?

Where does this come from? It seems a bit bare bones, has no credentials, references, licence, introduction or anything like that so it is hard figure out: https://edn-query-language.org