Thank you. As someone who follows the (b)leading edge of Clojure and its tooling very closely -- and has run alphas of Clojure itself in production since 2011 -- it's very hard for me now to put myself in the shoes of someone coming new to this tooling (unfortunately).
I think perhaps the biggest issue for most people is discoverability: how do I learn about the tools I need to get "task X" done with the Clojure CLI, deps.edn, and associated "stuff".
Even though I created clj-new (and boot-new, on which it is based, which in turn was based on lein's new), I pretty much never use it myself, except for quick examples to test stuff and/or help beginners with. I always start a project from scratch with an empty deps.edn and an initial src/myns/myfile.clj or similar.
I use depstar heavily but I strongly suspect that it will ultimately go away as tools.build matures to the point where all the special cases that depstar handles today are folded into t.b.api/jar and t.b.api/uber -- I don't want to maintain something that duplicates what the core team have poured so much time, effort, and careful thought into!
I'm already contemplating a "reboot" of clj-new as a very simple wrapper around t.b.api/copy-dir with some simple templates -- since that's most of what clj-new does (even the more complex template-running stuff is really only a slight augmentation of t.b.api's create-basis + java-command + process).