You can avoid it's use through create-class, but it's freely supported and suggested to use it to access the lifecycle callbacks.

Given that there is a supported and suggested pathway to achieving core functionality of the library which involves the use of metadata to define the semantics of your components I stand by my statement. I'm happy to roll back on "the worst thing ever" if a bit of exaggeration is intolerable, but the fact that this exists in the API is a huge wart even given the fact that it's not required.

Weavejester below suggests that use of metadata like this isn't even such a big deal for Clojure, but I cannot agree. In a language with primarily immutable data structures it's just silly to trust metadata as semantics-bearing given that it's invisible, ubiquitous, and often discarded.

I do really like it on vars, though.