I ran into that bug too. It's the first bug that I've encountered with Leiningen after using it for more than five years. Sorry that that was your first experience with the toolset, but it's far from the normal experience.

Also, if you're happy using an editor other than Emacs, then go for it. I use it but only because I've been using it for quite some time, and other than the fact that I like the way emacs indents Clojure source there's nothing special about it in the way that I use it. Visual Code has nice support for the language so that's a good option if it's more up your alley.

One area where I see Lightmod being really helpful is setting up the initial project. Learning what's going on w/cljsbuild, figwheel and then how to combine that with Clojure in the same project file isn't the simplest thing in the world to say the least.