It's just a different mode of scanning than what we've become accustomed to by working in mainly ALGOL-derived languages. With practice, it becomes second nature (and ALGOLs seem needlessly verbose by comparison :)
When you read a Lisp one liner, to me it seems like there are many implicit details you have to hold in your head. "Ok after this parenthesis now you have a list of maps keyed by symbols with string values. Ok go up one parenthesis and now it's transformed to a list of maps with..." Continue unwrapping for 3 levels. Get messaged by coworker. "Ok. Where was I? Fuck."
Rich Hickey said something along the lines of "If a function only deals with mutability in local variables (for performance), it's still a pure function". I prefer reading imperative functions that are still pure in that sense and spell out each transformation line by line to reading highly compact code written in powerful languages. Maybe I'm just dumb.