I would highly advise newcomers to CLJS to use lein cljsbuild, reagent, and the figwheel template. It is by far the most popular tooling for CLJS - although recently shadow-cljs folks have been quite loud.
I'm definitely one of shadow-cljs folks. We are trying to shorten the steps and paths people coming from JavaScript world to ClojureScript. Figwheel is a great tool, just not a perfect one to people with JavaScript background.
Could you elaborate a little bit on how figwheel is challenging for people with JS background and how shadow-cljs differs?
Try getting Figwheel to work with Emacs CIDER and Spacemacs. It's a joke. This is what you have to go through: https://github.com/bhauman/lein-figwheel/wiki/Using-the-Figw... and at the end of it Spacemacs told me cider-connect-clojurescript was not available. I'm not the only one who's given up on this. Quite a few luminaries in the Clojurescript world have abandoned Emacs/CIDER.
Configuring lein scripts. Debugging JVM problems. Guess how JavaScript developers hate JVM exceptions.
Lein is a declarative build tool. Perhaps your problem lies with not understanding how the tools work?