We really built Clarity because we were in your position. No framework out there was able to provide us with what we needed to ship high quality, enterprise software but with modern and consumer-like UIs. We needed that framework to care deeply about user experience (not just provide code) and we wanted to make sure that framework is flexible enough that teams across the company (before we open sourced) can have the ability to understand it, build on top of it, etc.
We really looked around and every time we found something it had a part of the puzzle but not really enough of a part that we can depend on it.
Clarity does not depend on material (the design language), we are definitely inspired by material and others but we're building an end to end design system which includes the user experience and visual language aspects. Behind the components and patterns is a ton of research that we've doing throughout the past few months (and sometimes years depending on the data we have) and want to continue to do. One of our goals is to also share that research in case you can reach different conclusions so the community is able to keep us moving in the right direction.