I went through the same pain points with GraphQL (to some extent I still do). I wound up writing a clojure wrapper around the Java GraphQL library, and that was a pretty easy endeavor, and got me farther along than the native library option. I keep telling myself to take time and open source it.

For the editor, I found a happiness with Atom + Proto REPL + Parinfer + Paredit (barely used). I wish I could get better integration with linting tools. I tried the vim approach for a while but Atom was way ahead in terms of REPL and Parinfer support. I'm not paying the cost to switch to emacs.